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TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.
The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.
I hope you’ll enjoy the new selections that will be presented here each week.Joe Carillo
Wisdom isn’t just knowledge, understanding but a divine blessing
A prolific author, Harvard Medical School medicine professor Jerome Groopman says that although knowledge and understanding are necessary, they are not enough for achieving wisdom in medical practice. In “The Best Medicine,” an article he wrote for the In Character website, he says that wisdom in diagnosis involves not only deep knowledge about human biology and an understanding of the array of diseases that plague humankind but also metacognition, or the ability to think about our thinking, as well as recognition of wisdom as a divine blessing. “The attribute of humility is embodied in the concept of metacognition,” he explains. “We recognize that our minds are imperfect, that there are limits to the validity of our assumptions, that we are subject to biases, and that therefore we must have the sharp sense to doubt our judgments and question whether we considered everything that should have been considered.”
Relating the misdiagnosis of his mother as having developed “hysterical blindness” when she was 30 years old, Dr. Groopman cites statistics that about 15 percent of all medical complaints are misdiagnosed. “Many people assume that such diagnostic mistakes are related to technical factors, like mixing up tubes of blood in the laboratory so that the results given to the physician are for the wrong patient,” he says. “Such technical errors are, in fact, rare. The vast majority of misdiagnoses are related to cognitive biases, thinking traps that occur more often under time pressure and uncertainty.”
Read Dr. Jerome Groopman’s “The Best Medicine” in In Character now!
