Hippocrates: How Doctors Doc Who They Are Summary

The Death of Hippocrates: How Doctors Forgot Who They Are It is fascinating and even unbelievable to think about advancement of the medical field in the last 100 years. 50 years ago, MRI and X-ray machines were yet not commonly used technology. Doctors were spending hours to collect pieces of a complicated puzzle, which included symptoms based on careful listening to patients’ descriptions of pain and some elementary tests such as blood testing. Nowadays, it is quite scary to imagine how doctors were managing to investigate conditions of their patients based on words and descriptions of something as vague as pain. However, despite the difficulties and limited resources, they still had strength and passion to heal humans. Doctors shared one
Although the Oath of Hippocrates has been criticized for some ideas, the medical society still considers the writing of a Greek thinker and the Father of Medicine, Hippocrates, as a
or a sophisticated researcher to see this evolving tragedy in the medical field because any ordinary person can observe the lack of empathy during routine check-ups or therapies. One of the people who has noticed it is multiple awards winning writer, Eula Biss. In her philosophical essay, “The Pain Scale”, she observes, analyzes, and criticizes a commonly used pain-measurement tool, numerical pain scale. This tool involves numbers from zero to five and sometimes illustrates smileys next to each number with different emotion. A board with the scale is proudly hanging in many rooms and offices of doctors or can also be verbally presented by a doctor or a nurse. The idea of the scale is simple. Zero means that there is no pain and life is wonderful. Five means that a patient is experiencing severe pain or discomfort, which requires immediate medical treatment. However, as Eula Biss, noticed, this concept, which was introduced by the medical society to provide an accurate way of pain measurement, is extremely abstract and difficult because the numbers restrict patients to express what they truly feel. As she analyzes the technique, she discovers an essential question that doesn’t have a given answer, “Where does pain worth measuring begin? With poison ivy? With a hang nail? With a stubbed toe? A sore throat? A needle prick? A razor cut?” (Biss page#). In other