Monday Musing: When Medicine Feels Uncertain
By Samar Verma, PhD
In Search of the Right Doctor
It is a curious feature of modern life that falling ill is often the simplest part of the story. A virus slips in, a back begins to ache, blood pressure creeps up in silence. The body, in its own way, knows what it is doing. The real effort, as many friends and contemporaries will confirm, begins the moment we step into the healthcare system.
We rightly feel we live in an age of precision. We carry supercomputers in our pockets and send machines to Mars using unforgiving equations. Yet the moment we enter a clinic, that reassuring sense of certainty starts to fray. I often find myself wondering: is medicine really a science in the way gravity or chemistry is a science, or is it a high-stakes gamble- sometimes dressed in white coats?
A disclaimer is needed. None of this should in any way be construed as disrespectful to the medical fraternity, or anyone else, for that matter. It is the puzzled reflection of a patient, driven by curiosity and lived experience.
The Great Doctor Hunt
The ritual is familiar. A symptom appears. You do not simply walk into the nearest clinic. Instead, you set the “network” in motion. Family WhatsApp groups light up. Neighbours are consulted. A cousin knows a nurse who knows a specialist. Online reviews are read like restaurant ratings. Choosing a doctor feels less like hiring an expert and more like searching for “The One”.
Why should this be necessary? If medical education is standardised- if the anatomy diagrams in Delhi mirror those in London or New York- why does care vary so widely? Why is it that when I carry the same symptoms to three different specialists, I can emerge with three different diagnoses and three different prescriptions?
If I asked three engineers to calculate the safe load for a bridge, I would expect near-identical answers. In medicine, however, the “answer” often depends on who is sitting across the table. Is the variable the disease, or the doctor’s training, personality, appetite for risk, or even their mood that morning? The thought is mildly amusing and deeply unsettling. We rely on word of mouth because, at some level, we have accepted that finding the right doctor is about luck. But should something as basic as regaining health hinge on good fortune?
Science, Scientists, and the Space in Between
Much time in waiting rooms has left me worrying about a simple question: where exactly does the “science” in medical science begin and end?
To a layperson, the most obviously scientific part of the journey is the diagnostic test. The pathology lab feels like a temple of objectivity. If my blood sugar is 140, it is 140; the machine does not know my name or my history. Those numbers feel like bedrock, even if they may shift from one brand of machine to another (which is a quality standardisation issue in manufacturing).
Once those numbers reach a consulting room, however, they behave differently. One doctor sees an emergency demanding aggressive treatment. Another prescribes only lifestyle changes. A third waves it away as insignificant. If the inputs- the patient and the lab results- are fixed, why are the outputs- diagnosis and treatment- so fluid?
Perhaps the explanation is that medical school teaches the science, but practising medicine requires something closer to an art: judgement, improvisation, pattern recognition. As patients, we walk in hoping for the predictability of physics; what we encounter instead is the variability of human interpretation.
To be fair, our expectations may themselves be unrealistic. It may be wrong to expect the human body to behave like a bridge or a microchip. Engineers work with steel and concrete; these do not have hormones, genetic histories or bad days. Doctors work with living, changing bodies. They can argue, with reason, that they are not betraying the science at all; they are responding to biology’s complexity. Medicine, they remind us, lives in the world of probabilities, not certainties.
Seen from that angle, the apparent inconsistency between doctors may not signal ignorance but nuance. Different physicians may be trying, in good faith, to adapt scientific evidence to the messy reality of a particular life. Yet this explanation does not fully quieten the patient’s anxiety. It is still unsettling to know that your treatment path can change dramatically depending on which consulting room you happen to enter.
The Siloed Body
A second puzzle appears once we cross a certain age: the way modern medicine divides the body into silos.
Scientific progress has produced dazzling specialisation. There are experts for the heart, kidneys, lungs, spine and thyroid. Depth has increased enormously. But has breadth been sacrificed?
Again and again, I have watched conscientious specialists politely avoid engaging with the whole person. The cardiologist focuses on blood pressure and cholesterol, but sidesteps questions about a thyroid imbalance. The endocrinologist manages sugar levels and hormones, but does not wish to comment on knee pain or breathlessness. The unsaid message is simple: that is outside my department.
The result is that the patient becomes the project manager of their own body. We shuttle between consulting rooms, files in hand, stitching together fragments of advice into some kind of personal treatment plan. The heart doctor prescribes a beta-blocker, the lung specialist an inhaler, the orthopaedist an anti-inflammatory. But who is asking whether all these drugs, swimming in a single bloodstream, are interacting kindly or clashing quietly?
The body does not recognise hospital organisational charts. The liver does not seek the heart’s approval before responding to a medicine. Our organs function as an orchestra, yet the system often treats them as solo performers rehearsing in isolation. I have seen people treated successfully for one condition, only to slide into a new crisis because side-effects on another organ system were overlooked- simply because that organ belonged to someone else’s speciality.
In Praise of the Generalist
In this landscape, it is hard not to feel nostalgic for the old-fashioned family doctor: the general practitioner who knew your medical history, your household, your stresses, your habits; who could see that your backache might be linked to your anxiety, which in turn is linked to your blood pressure.
What we seem to lack today is a conductor for the orchestra. The system has become brilliantly advanced in its individual parts, yet strangely fragmented as a whole. For many of us, the struggle is not only against illness but against the maze of the healthcare system itself- finding someone who treats the person, not just the organ that is currently misbehaving.
A Patient’s Closing Reflection
None of this is meant to diminish the extraordinary difficulty of a doctor’s work. Few professions carry such daily responsibility for human vulnerability and fear.
But as patients, we are entitled to voice our bewilderment. Why does the experience of care feel so dependent on serendipity? Why does something called “medical science” feel, from the inside, so subjective? Perhaps the next phase in the evolution of medicine lies in closing this gap: marrying the rigour of diagnostics with a more integrated, humane approach to treatment; valuing the whole person as much as the finely studied part.
Until that happens, we will continue to lean on WhatsApp recommendations, informal networks and a touch of prayer, hoping that the doctor we finally choose is not only well-versed in the science of the body, but also wise in the art of being human. In the end, that is what most of us seek when we fall ill: a little certainty, competent kindness, and the comfort of feeling safely held in an uncertain world.
