why you should question everything

As a health care provider, I'm accustomed to dispensing advice. I tell my patients how they can lower their cholesterol levels. How much exercise they should get. Why they should definitely get the Covid-19 vaccine. And colon cancer screening. Patients, even friends and relatives, expect it.

"If it's free, it's advice.

If you pay for it, it's counseling."

~Jack Adams~

Now that I'm older and wiser, I have one more piece of advice to impart:

Save your money,

and invest it wisely so you can retire early. 

Why? Because it can take a long time to unlearn what you were taught that has become obsolete, or been proven wrong, or was outright false to begin with. It isn't easy to undo all that contradicts your sense of what is compassionate, fair, and true. It isn't easy. There's a lot to do, and it takes time.

Think about it. We now have access to information we couldn't imagine when we first entered medical practice. We didn't have MRIs or PET scans. We were just learning about the applications of radioactive isotopes in diagnosis and treatment. Laparoscopic and cryosurgery weren't options. Immunotherapy wasn't even on the horizon back then.

It's disconcerting to realize that the care we thought was top-notch proved to be ineffective, or worse, harmful to our patients. We know now that we were doing CPR all wrong. We were abusing antibiotics. We didn't recognize the existence of the human biome and its role in health and illness. Our understanding of epigenetics has changed the way we view the transmission and inheritance of DNA. We dismissed the importance of the mind-body-spirit connection in illness and health. 

The fact that we know better now...that we have learned over time...is a good thing. But this is the point:

"The important thing is

never to stop questioning."

~Albert Einstein~

This pertains to everything in life...to all we have been taught, or want to believe, or have been coerced into accepting as truth...about evolution, about the natural world, about cultural norms, about religion, and about science itself.

Question everything...and then,

when you think you have it figured out,

question yourself. 

As the Buddha put it:

"Believe nothing,

no matter where you read it

or who has said it, not even if I have said it,

unless it agrees with your own reason

and your own common sense."

~Buddha~

jan