Communicating in science and medicine
In the prescientific area of medicine, communication was perhaps one of
the most important tools available to physicians. As such, writings on the role
of communications in patient care date back to ancient times with Hippocrates
and Galen.
Hippocrates is the first to employ the concept
of karios in medicine drawing upon the situational context each individual
patient requires as well as the necessity and timelines of the proper
treatment. In Diseases
Hippocrates finds that ‘opportune moments in medicine, generally speaking, are
many and varied, just as are the diseases, affections and their treatments. He
goes on in Precepts to describe
‘healing is a matter of time [chronos], but it is also sometimes a matter of
opportunity [kairos]. The flexibility kairos allows is a perfect fit for
medicine, as situational determinism or the variable components of medicine can
be accurately expressed.Consider
the numerous variables in medicine :
·
The environment: how weather
influences health, as such preferable climates for respiratory or arthritic
conditions
·
The cause: pathogen or
physiological malfunction
·
The person: age, gender, race
·
The treatment: both selecting
it and the proper time to perform it
·
The era: what treatments and
technologies are available
If the doctor intervenes at the right time
with the proper treatment he may alter the course of events and help the
patient. Medicine
progressed very modestly from the time of these historical physicians until the
birth of biomedicine during the Second World War.
Modern biomedicine is the coalescence of increased understanding of
biology, the invention of diagnostic technologies and development of effective
therapeutic treatments. With the rise of science in medicine came an associated
decrease in the value of communication skills. The re-focusing, in modern
times, on the importance communication in a global medical community is long
overdue and remains undervalued. More cross-disciplinary work that translate
theory into applicable best-practices should be encouraged in both the
communications and biomedical fields.
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