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Letters to the Editor  |   November 2008
Pathos
Mai Kim Ho, OMS V
Author Affiliations
  • Mai Kim Ho, OMS V
    Undergraduate Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine Teaching Fellow Rancho Cucamonga, Calif
Article Information
Cardiovascular Disorders / Neuromusculoskeletal Disorders / Professional Issues
Letters to the Editor   |   November 2008
Pathos
The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, November 2008, Vol. 108, 669. doi:10.7556/jaoa.2008.108.11.669
The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, November 2008, Vol. 108, 669. doi:10.7556/jaoa.2008.108.11.669
The revolution died before I was born.
 What remains, a picture of a bearded man pondering a bleached femur and his pithy quotes on PowerPoint.  
And it is continuously killed before it can be reborn
 with poorly written rhetoric from little clinical trials and little case studies.  
Killed by a reductionist, rational, deductive, objective evidence-based approach to reality
 with generalized statements made by the left pre-frontal cortex of scientists turned professors.  
Evidence-based medicine is evidently biased against me—
 the sensating, subjective, non sequitur participant.  
I am unable to conform in inter-rater reliability studies.
 I unwittingly provoke a strong placebo response.  
I unfortunately may never negate the null hypothesis
 using my heart and hands—along with my brain to practice this art.  
Although these days, the practice of medicine
 is taught mostly as a science.  
And humanism is sprinkled in—
 apparently it needs to be written in learning objectives in order to empirically prove it was actually taught.  
Teaching, it unlikely would be revived by preaching his autobiography
 or by rehashing the history of those that fought for its existence.  
I wonder how my heart became inspired
 and my hands became the manner through which I interfaced with healing?  
Maybe it was because a few dedicated individuals educated me
 And I took the philosophy-practices-hypotheses and experimented on people?  
Maybe because I am continually inspired by the life I feel beneath my fingertips
 Or because it gives me time to actually talk with the patient?  
There is one study that I would like to conduct;
 the n is currently unknown, the confounding variables have not been removed, it has not been approved by the Human Subjects Committee and the data cannot be analyzed using Fourier transformations.  
My hypothesis is:
 Burning hearts united in their efforts to practice osteopathy can reignite the revolution.  
 Photo of Andrew Taylor Still, MD, DO © Still National Osteopathic Museum, Kirksville, Mo