On the intolerance of ideas, and liberty …

I like thinking and learning. Birthdays surely make one slower on the bike, but birthdays, it seems, do not have the same drag on the brain. For me, birthdays have increased my appreciation of liberty. In the Constitution of Liberty, Hayek defines it as the absence of coercion. Such is a beautiful definition. Don’t coerce me to wear a bike helmet when I ride my Dutch bike to work. Don’t coerce an 85 year-old with life-limiting disease to stop smoking. And above all, don’t coerce people-without-complaints to have unproven tests in the name of health. Piotr Skrabanek wrote in the Death of Humane Medicine that “the pursuit of health is a symptom of unhealth.” (That would be an apt blog title for this era of the quantified self.) Birthdays have also brought me an appreciation of contrarian views. Christopher Hitchens famously said in Letters to a Young Contrarian that to be a contrarian is not to be a nihilist. When I question entrenched dogma, or a dubious new drug or the latest new toy for cardiologists, these views do not equate with nihilism. Hell, I sometimes ablate patients with dilated left atria and persistent atrial fib. Medical culture shuns uncertainty. I like thinking about how little we know. Medical culture favors conformity. I find that tiresome and pretentious. One of the challenges of being a medical writer is that embracing uncertainty and calling out hype can hurt one’s ability to function in the mainstream. You don’t g...
Source: Dr John M - Category: Cardiology Authors: Source Type: blogs