No two patients are ever the same

Last evening, we watched Oliver Sacks: His Own Life.  

What a life story, with tremendous personal troubles that were mirrored by remarkable accomplishments!

The following is from my post on August 31, 2015, after Sacks died.

Like many, I too read more than one obituary piece on Sacks.  In this one, at the New Yorker, I found something especially insightful:

 He resisted the powerful current of modern practice that seeks the generic. He rejected a monolithic mindset, and retrieved the individual from the obscuring blanket of statistics. This put him outside of the academy, exiled to chronic-care institutions. Through his writing, Sacks ultimately received recognition for advancing a unique form of clinical scholarship that was largely abandoned: the study of the single person within the context of his own life. Ever the acute observer, his case histories confirmed that under a single diagnostic term was a spectrum of human biology. No two patients are ever the same, he emphasized. ...
Every dimension of the patient was meaningful in his thinking.

 Against the generic.  No two patients are ever the same.

Powerful ideas.  Ideas that are relevant not only to the medical practice alone and, instead, they are applicable to every walk of life.  We often forget that no two people are the same.

In any professional practice, there is a reason, I suppose, that we go with the generic--it is "cost efficient."  But then, I have problems getting even the best fitting shoe because my feet are not the generic 7.5 size!  If that is the problem with the feet, then think about the brain, the biochemistry, the ...

Even though Sacks kept the individual patient in the front and center,

This did not mean Sacks was a Luddite. He was an avid reader of scientific journals, fascinated by scientific advancements in imaging the nervous system at work. He engaged in dialogue with Nobel laureates and lab scientists about the nature of consciousness, providing what they lacked—the insights of a naturalist, a field worker.

Sacks showed us that being an "artisan" didn't therefore automatically mean being opposed to scientific and technological advancements.  He made it seem easy how to use those advancements in order to make his individual-centered approach that much more rewarding to his patients.

I saw Sacks in person, and heard him, when he was in Portland on a book tour, which was soon after the publication of Uncle Tungsten.  Even from the back rows of the auditorium, it was clear that he was full of energy.  I had no idea at that time about the complicated and miserable life that he had lived in his younger years; reading about those made me appreciate his energy and commitment all the more.

His own words, from a couple of weeks ago, seem to be the best way to end this post, especially because of the references to the meaning of life and inner peace and happiness, about which I often blog:

And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.