Making God Necessary, by Deepak Chopra

https://parabola.org/2018/10/27/making-god-necessary-by-deepak-chopra/?fbclid=IwAR1DiSQADn_0KjXNS4tn-1fxo7U1XzahmdWCjSyW74BrcG6yUTtLwgDCZAg

Making God Necessary, by Deepak Chopra  

Why God is a verb, not a noun



The practice of medicine, which I began after moving from India to the United States in 1971, is an odd opening to God. But finding out what’s wrong with a patient comes close to being a spiritual investigation, improbable as this may sound. Unless someone is wheeled into the emergency room with a broken leg or a gunshot wound—both were common occurrences in the New Jersey hospital that was my first exposure to American medicine—the doctor begins by asking, “What’s wrong?” The patient then gives a subjective account of his aches, pains, and specific discomfort. This account is likely to be filtered through distortions such as high anxiety, distrust of medicine, or in my case back then, skepticism that a young M.D. from India really knew anything. (“Can I see a real doctor?” was written on the faces of many patients in an era when the Vietnam War had created a doctor shortage, leading to an influx of foreign-born and foreign-trained physicians.)

Although we all visit the doctor routinely to find out what’s wrong with us, certain situations depend almost entirely upon subject-reporting. Pain is the most obvious example. There is no objective measure for pain, no reliable scale like the level of liver enzymes or hormones in the blood. “It hurts” is the only standard, and the patient’s description of how much it hurts and where cannot be refuted. Depression and anxiety are also heavily dependent on subject-reporting. Even though brain scans are beginning to offer a hint at objective measurement, the general conclusion seems to be that every depressed patient is a unique case.

Diagnosis, then, implies a subtle struggle between what the patient report and what the physician concludes to be true. The unspoken object of this contest, from the doctor’s viewpoint, is to reduce subjectivity as much as possible so that medical science can get at the facts and nothing but the facts. It is absolutely necessary for subjectivity not to rule the practice of medicine, while on the other hand pure objectivity is a chimera.

https://parabola.org/2018/10/27/making-god-necessary-by-deepak-chopra/?fbclid=IwAR1DiSQADn_0KjXNS4tn-1fxo7U1XzahmdWCjSyW74BrcG6yUTtLwgDCZAg

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