This next podcast is one from the archives – a conversation with my friend Jonathan McFarland (president of the Doctor as a Humanist) from July 29, 2023.

Jonathan and I have been comparing our KU (Kopacz Units) & MU (McFarland Units) as both of us have worked our way through phases of health and illness. I can tell that I was not feeling very well during this interchange, it was about a month after I started going back to work, after 2.5 months off for illness, and I was still quite fatigued.

We discuss wide-ranging array of topics, as usual, including:

• holding our own
• flourishing and thriving (or the lack thereof)
• is health is more than the absence of disease?
• the work of Doctor as a Humanist
• shaking and quaking
• the counter-curriculum
• listening to the body
• lost in the wilderness of the body
• lost in the sterile corridors of contemporary medicine
• Ivan Illich, Sir William Osler, Arthur Kleinman, CLOSLER, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Karl Marlantes
• micro-invalidations in medicine
• the project of science and the silencing of the human element
• what it feels like to be on the receiving end of reductionistic medicine
• doctors as information managers and technicans vs. healers

We close with the summary:

“Medical schools and medical education – and continuing medical education as well – are very good at
taking a human being and turning them into a technician, but they’re not very good at helping that technician connect to the human being of themselves, or the patient.” (Kopacz)