My reality and yours.
نویسنده
چکیده
I was having coffee with a friend in a Greenwich Village café when he announced suddenly that we had to leave. " Why? " I asked. Because, he said, acid was dripping from the ceiling. I thought for a moment and took a chance. I asked whether he wanted me to take him to the VA hospital in Northport, about an hour's drive from Manhattan. His answer, " yes, " was a sur-prise—and a relief. The dripping acid seemed real enough for him to act urgently, but he had enough grasp on reality to know he was ill and needed treatment. Many years later, I had an artificial lens implanted in one eye. The acuity in that eye improved, but I was delightfully surprised—because I had not thought of it—that colors became bright and crisp as they must have been when I was a child. My other eye now saw things with a sepia tint that I had not been aware of. I joked that I could choose between two realities—an amusement made possible because I could account for it. But what if I couldn't – what if somehow I had been born like that? Which perception of the world would be be " real " ? Or, since I could not rely on my eyes, could " real " be something entirely different? If thought derives in part from experience, this is no idle question. It has engaged philosophers for 2,500 years with significant implications for medicine. But it is science, not philosophy, on which modern medicine is grounded. Science has given us understanding of vitamins , hormones, microbes, neurotransmitters, nucleotides, the cellular substance and functions of our bodies and the disorders that attend them. Science now promises a new personal medicine customized to our individual genetic particularity. Who could fault us for believing that for all queries science will provide? And so, it is to science that medicine looks for understanding of mental illness Neuroanatomy began, so far as we know, in biblical times 1 and began to advance 500 years ago when Vesalius reviewed and corrected Galen's anatomical descriptions. With keen observation, experiment and, later, with the power of electronics , neuroscientists have been mapping the brain and localizing function with finer and finer precision. Neurochemistry, on the other hand, is only about 50 years old. 2 In this time, we have gained enormous insight into complex …
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ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- Medicine and health, Rhode Island
دوره 92 6 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2009