This week I discovered a study that has blown my mind. And that’s what I’m talking to you about today. I have learned that in medicine there is a field of study that dissects what the English call “gut feelings.” In Spanish we could translate it as the “clinical eye” or the “hunches” of professionals. Come on, when your doctor says while looking at some results: “um, I don’t like this.”
It turns out that there are people who have begun, with a scientific method, to measure the effectiveness of this intuitive thinking trained on the basis of seeing patients, having time to listen to them, and also making mistakes, I suppose. People who have taken pains to measure how much it allows them to predict what is going to happen.
The culprit of this cool discovery is the doctor Bernardino Oliva, who has had his hands in this mass for years and has just published a study about it. in the latest issue of the magazine of the Spanish Society of Family and Community Medicine (Semfyc). Oliva states that “the predictive value of hunches is, at least, comparable to that of many symptoms or signs recognized as alarms.”
What struck him most when entering this field of study, he acknowledged when I spoke with him, was seeing that he was right 12% of the time when he had a hunch that something serious was going to happen. In Primary Care, everything comes through the door. For the majority, it is expected that it will not be serious because there are other healthcare resources to deal with emergencies, but this is not always the case.
Health centers are a diamond to be discovered. Also for me. But the diamond, although it shines, is buried by kilos and kilos of earth that hide it. To write this article I spoke with a handful of female doctors and family doctors. Everyone agreed: to have good hunches you need experience, but above all it takes time. The five rushed minutes that a consultation lasts are not worth sitting down, talking, getting to know each other. They bury the diamond. A year ago I saw an exhibition by the artist Georgia O Keeffe at the Moma in New York that was titled: “To see takes time.” It could also be applied to Primary Care and so many other things.
If you are interested and want to read the full article, here I leave it again.
While you were doing other things…
- Is it better for a colleague or a doctor to tell you? Young people can be lgreat allies in the fight against smoking. Let’s take advantage of it.
- Spain is not guaranteeing the right to health of the residents of Cañada Real, who have been without electricity for years without anything happening. The ruling is from the Council of Europe.
The public health revolution
I don’t know if you know about CAR-T therapies. I’ll give you a quick explainer before telling you some good news. They are cutting-edge and personalized treatments that are based on extracting the person’s blood, isolating part of their T lymphocytes to teach them in a laboratory to fight cancer cells. Once “programmed,” they are reintroduced into the bodies of cancer patients.
CAR-T therapies are seeing impressive results in blood cancers. But they are very expensive and access is complex in an ecosystem dominated by pharmaceutical industries and their own commercial interests. The good news that I announced to you is that public health has begun to develop its own CAR-T therapies in a self-sufficient manner in a Catalan hospital: the Clínic de Barcelona.
Olivier is one of the patients who has been able to access this therapy. Since 2021, when he received the two infusions with his own cells, he is in complete remission of his multiple myeloma. Here he tells us his story. A story of hope and one more reason to value public health. The one that does not fail us. Everyone’s.
I’m done with this. I would love for you to tell me, if you have had it and feel like it, good news related to health or the health system. Or that you told me about a doctor, a nurse or a caretaker of whom you have fond memories. I leave it there. The mailbox remains open.
Until next week.
Sofia
#family #doctor #saves #lives #imagine
