(Art, Design & Society course post)
Pulitzer Prize winner Siddhartha Mukherjee's 'The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science' turn clinical anecdotes and medical research fragments into parables and aphorisms, that illustrate the largely incomprehensible and complex, yet exciting, world of medical practice. To undertand why practitioners need to 'make perfect decisions with imperfect information', the writer reveals nuances in the study of the 'soft science', which is still largely obfuscated without many governing laws, absolutes; and relies a lot on 'in-liers', outliers, biases and intuition.
A 'lawless, uncertain' discipline must be having at least certain basic tenets, Mukherjee thinks, and goes on the present a lucid, unambiguous trail, citing astronomer Tycho Brahe, scientist Lewis Thomas, Bayes theorem, the Uncertainity Principle, randomized double-blind studies, in a fantastic delightful read. The complex ideas are given delicate shape by the free-flowing juxtaposition, and fine writing style. To bring in wider human cognizance and understanding into the complex processes that occur within the human body is revealatory. It also throws light into how abstract notions based on certain pre-study and episodic knowledge grow up to be widely regarded facts or axioms in a scientific world, thereby giving the non-scientific populace observations about how the medical discipline understands human being and existence, and how it understands itself.
Pulitzer Prize winner Siddhartha Mukherjee's 'The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science' turn clinical anecdotes and medical research fragments into parables and aphorisms, that illustrate the largely incomprehensible and complex, yet exciting, world of medical practice. To undertand why practitioners need to 'make perfect decisions with imperfect information', the writer reveals nuances in the study of the 'soft science', which is still largely obfuscated without many governing laws, absolutes; and relies a lot on 'in-liers', outliers, biases and intuition.
A 'lawless, uncertain' discipline must be having at least certain basic tenets, Mukherjee thinks, and goes on the present a lucid, unambiguous trail, citing astronomer Tycho Brahe, scientist Lewis Thomas, Bayes theorem, the Uncertainity Principle, randomized double-blind studies, in a fantastic delightful read. The complex ideas are given delicate shape by the free-flowing juxtaposition, and fine writing style. To bring in wider human cognizance and understanding into the complex processes that occur within the human body is revealatory. It also throws light into how abstract notions based on certain pre-study and episodic knowledge grow up to be widely regarded facts or axioms in a scientific world, thereby giving the non-scientific populace observations about how the medical discipline understands human being and existence, and how it understands itself.
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