DR. GOOGLE
Today I looked up in Wikipedia to see what a prostate does. I’ve had one for 85 years and have no idea what it does. But when I read what it does I have trouble understanding the explanation. One function is to serve as a switch between sending urine down the urethra and sending vascular fluid which is part of ejaculation. One tube is used for both and so one has to be blocked and the other allowed through. But the rest of the description of the prostate’s function and components was beyond me. Then I looked to see what the testes do. Their main function is to produce sperm and the reason they hang outside the body is for temperature control. But I also learned that the gonads (whatever they are) begin to develop in the fourth week after conception. The gonads can grow into either female ovaries or male testes when the determination of whether the embryo will be male or female is made. Then the testes or ovaries slowly develop and shift to their proper place in the developing body.
Now this is not a biology lesson because I am just imperfectly repeating Wikipedia’s information. What this naive understanding of what is going inside me does to me is to reveal how complex the human body is and how much humans have been able to understand and explain the functioning of the human body.
I am just an ordinary, confused person trying to make his way through life. Just trying to figure in a haphazard way what is going on. I am not a scientist and wouldn’t want to be. I wouldn’t want to be a urologist who day after day confronts the same problem of old men not being able to pee because of an enlarged prostate any more than I would want to be a dentist looking daily into people’s wide open mouths. I would not want to spend the years and years that it takes to get enough knowledge to be certified to be able to be certified either profession, even if I was smart enough.
The problem is that the amount of information in any area of scientific study is so enormous that to be able to competently explain or put into practice any field of knowledge you have to narrow down and narrow down until you are competent in one small area of knowledge.
And the problem there is that the more you know about one narrow area of study the less you know about everything else.
I always wondered as a liberal arts college teacher why it was so necessary to know everything about a tiny area of knowledge, for example the growth and development of Moghul music in India, that almost no one is excited about, although it is quite beautiful, when this takes all your research time, when what your are trying to give students is a broad genearal introduction to all of human understanding. The faculty of a small college may all together know it all, but each individual teacher is pushed to know a great deal about very little with a result that he or she knows very little about everything else leading an 85 year old teacher like to me be clueless about what his prostrate does. The body of information is expanding almost at the speed of the expanding universe, and the greater it becomes the narrower we have to be if we want to master any one area and be an expert whom everyone trusts.
With Wikipedia and the rest of the information on the Internet as an example I am coming to the suspicion that the only way to be an expert on everything at once and to get the whole picture is to be a computer. Google knows everything. Ask it a question about anything and it will give you an answer. Sure it can make mistakes, but humans do, too. My cluelessness is a good example.
While at a liberal arts college we break things down into academic disciplines and subjects and sub subjects and similarly when I have a medical problem I start with a general practitioner who knows enough to send me to the right specialist who sends me to a sub specialist, everyone supremely confident in their own understanding but realizing how narrow it is. That happened when I went to Ashville Eye to have my vision checked and was sent to Asheville Retina Associates who don’t handle the whole eye, just the retina where I got a shot in my eyeball for a blood clot. It is happening now when I get sent from the Family Health Respiratory clinic to Ashville Urological who. for all I know, will send me to Asheville Prostate center where maybe they will have specialists in each of the layers of a prostate. And it could be that when I get to know and trust these people I will suddenly have a midnight flare up and because none of these offices are open will be sent to Memorial Mission where there will be have another complete set of specialists, hospitalists, whom I don’t know at all who will come in one after another to look at me and run up an enormous bill as has happened to my friends who have gone through it.
Computer Dr. Google sounds pretty inhumane and unfeeling to me, but this other system of friendly family doctor (remember the long ago family doctor who would make house visits by horse and buggy?) shifting me to the Respiratory Clinic because they have openings who send me to the urologist and maybe a group of hospitalists doesn’t sound too humane to me. But it is the price we pay for specialization.
Another possible price could have happened to me. I was in a respiratory clinic and what they were looking for was Covid and viruses. When I tested negative to all of these they could have sent me home cleared of a problem I didn’t have. But I wanted to be cleared of every possible problem before flying around the world and told them about other unrelated symptoms like throwing up two weeks earlier and having trouble peeing which has been a problem for years and said I wanted a urine sample as well. I was afraid that a specialist in respiratory disease would only look for what they were a specialist in which is a problem with being specialist, you may only look for what you want to rule out and not for something that another specialist might look for. But they found blood in the urine and are sending me off to a specialist, a urologist.
Pass the right symptoms on to Dr. Google, and he could probably treat me right at home in my own bed, skipping all the specialists, and could probably send me to the right surgery center if surgery were needed. And when artificial intelligence develops empathy and feeling Dr. Google would probably be as comforting as the hospitalists dropping by for five minutes once a day.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 