Malcolm S.M. Watts, MD, argues for the development of a new social science of health care to supplement medicine’s existing “inhuman, amoral, and surely insensitive” system of bioscience (AMN, March 16). While I sympathize with his motives, we don’t need to create a new branch of science to humanize medicine, we need to make the science we now have into something more basic.
We are presently in the throes of a major scientific revolution. For centuries, the center of our understanding has been a system of knowledge called science. This construct of objective truths and laws of operation has served us well – until now. Nobel laureate Roger W. Sperry says science has a blind spot, a neglected area, which is the area of human subjective experience. He believes that we must now leave behind the determinism and materialism of this science, and recognize the primacy of inner conscious awareness as a causal reality.
The task in this scientific revolution is to integrate our subjective desires for the good of society with the machinery of our objective science. In this, our overriding imperative must be human values rather than just technological progress.