The Purpose Of Medicine

By RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR

It's, indeed, a big question. What is the purpose of medical education -- especially in today's context?

Rationally speaking, one could arrive at a plausible maxim: medical education, in its first and foremost sense, must give aspiring physicians -- and, more importantly, teaching and practicing professionals -- a sense of meaning.

Besides, it ought to inspire them with both purpose and optimism. For one simple, nay strong, reason. Any individual's life would seem useful only when the world at large makes evocation. The supposition: medical professionals need to be shown that template, not just in terms of goals, but also its effusive purport.

This is not all. Medical graduates, professionals/specialists, and therapists, should also be given a sense of belonging, a feeling of connectivity to a cause -- without an element of rummaging delineation that defames their job with an affixed sense of insensitivity. It's, needless to say, that, any education, which is not worth the scroll it is written on, cannot build a community, or care for it. Worse still, it won't give any individual a sense of self-worth.

It is, indeed, tragic that medical education, today, for more reasons than one, lacks independent objective. Not many teachers inspire us any more -- and, most importantly, we have a plethora of frenzied portals of learning that confers itself to a murky tune: you are above someone else. Hence, what is being dished out as education, in its essence, is mere reverence, and "enslavement," not self-worth, or reliance. Result: you have a jumbled mix of fawning attitudes and dependent behaviours that support hierarchical institutions. It explains why medical colleges, in their growing numbers, are producing "photo-," not original-copies.

This is also a stunning oddity in a new world of rapid and great change -- we ourselves empathise. Small wonder, that, our colleges and universities are becoming increasingly inappropriate, just as much as a motley party of apologists continues to tinker around with a system that is as obsolete as the manual typewriter.

Be that as it may, you don't have a "scratch-card" solution to educational illness. Worse still, the dominant school of medicine has not given medical education the wholesome diversity of alternative, or holistic medicine, that it truly needs -- a synergy, or means to evolve, grow, and expand. This is the need of the hour. It’s also an idea whose time has come, no less.

Diversity holds a vital prospect -- because, it is only multiplicity that heralds contention. Besides, it is also variance that leads to building and expanding interactions -- a framework balanced by mutual caring, especially when we are yearning for humane healthcare. So, if we are to emerge from the shadows, we need to pay attention to the upshot of scale -- our medical schools/colleges must be streamlined and kept to a realistic size. They must also be regulated, not just as seats of learning, or portals of on-going medical education, but also as gateways of continuing medical research.

Medical education, in India, is in a state of anguish -- no less. It is time we impelled a meditative quest for a fresh meaning to it -- one that is in agreement with the groundwork of our epoch, the Age of the Infobahn, decentralisation, and democratic communication. In other words, an "on-the-ball" underpinning, or what the Zen masters would want us to apply in our classrooms, clinical practice, and research.

"In silence is learned what cannot be taught."