Some day I will perhaps follow up my previous blog here – brief thoughts on biases – with a longer piece on the tendency in modern thought to downgrade human observation and reflection because of the potential influence of bias – and relating to the name of this blog, clearly an issue for medical education itself.
Evidence-based medicine has too often been simplistically touted as the opposite of observation and experience. It is not. It is simply a systematic, conscientious effort to synthesise the formal effort of observation and experience that is experimental research. So here is a reblogged piece from my other effort in blogging…
Recently my brother gave me a present of Tristan Gooley‘s The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Tracks and Signs. I have read various Gooley books over the years, and to some I have given the signal honour of losing or getting ruined by rain. I have also found they are books which work much much better in physical form that as eBooks.
Tristan Gooley (source – his twitter page @NaturalNav)
Gooley’s books are deceptively digressive – there is a firm structure within which a vast array of knowledge from eclectic sources are displayed. This leads to learning an awful lot of what, in other hands, could be off-puttingly didactic material in an entertainingly brief time.
As well as this, just-one-more-bit quality, there is a generosity to Gooley’s prose which the following passage exemplifies:
Everybody will have seen treasure hunters on the beach at some point: solitary figures with headphones…
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A Medical Education 