A Little Humility Can Lead To A Lot Of Health

“None of us in science and medicine have the answers we tell you we have,” said Betsy Nabel, president of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School at last year’s TEDMED conference, “because the universe of what we don’t know dwarfs that of what we do know.”

Come again? Aren’t doctors supposed to know everything – well, most everything – when it comes to caring for our health? As it turns out, it’s just this misconception that Nabel aimed to blow out of the water with her remarks to the group gathered in Washington, D.C. – not so much for patients but for the doctors treating them.

“We’ve talked ourselves into thinking we know how the body works, how drugs treat disease, how a lot of things supposedly do a lot of other things,” she said. “We’ve made stunning progress as a society gaining knowledge, but the simple truth is that what we actually have is not knowledge at all. What has disguised itself as knowledge is actually information that is going to morph or frame-shift into something else next week, next year, maybe 10 or 50 years.”

This was no rallying cry for physicians to throw in the towel since, at least from our present perspective, nothing is set in stone. It was instead a kind of call to arms for those in the audience to have, in Nabel’s words, the intellectual humility to step aside from what appears to be fact and ask, “What if it’s not?”

“Humility is the secret ingredient that unveils truth and brings about change,” she said.

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Eric Nelson writes each week on the link between consciousness and health from his perspective as a practitioner of Christian Science. He also serves as spokesperson for Christian Science in Northern California. Follow him on Twitter @norcalcs.