Fracture

"Your humerus bone at the right arm has broken, at the site called greater tuberosity."

I told my friend firmly, with an authoritative tone, when he called me for help after a fall around one year ago.

Months later, I still remember the moment when I was first shown his X-ray at the emergency room waiting hall. "Going to be nonoperative treatment and short period of shoulder immobilization," I advised. "Well, at most two weeks," I continued, almost whispering to myself, "as what I just read from the British Medical Journal yesterday."

This is, of course, terribly strange and coincident that my friend had a humerus bone fracture the day after my reading the same topic. Alas, why on earth should a medical physician (like me) read about the subjects of broken bones? Usually that means doing a lot, and outside my specialty, obviously. Does this story – or revelation, if you prefer – imply that I am a prophet who can look up a subject before it happens?

Quite the opposite.

I have come to see that in real life, we can never make good predictions. Back in 1899, Charles H. Duell, the United States commissioner of patents, predicted that everything that can be invented has been invented. Even the visionary Bill Gates of Microsoft, tech guru that he is, wrote in 1981 that when it comes to computing, "640K should be enough for anyone."

How about the practice of medicine? Having a "highly differentiated" specialty, if not subspecialty, is part and parcel of entering the guild of medicine nowadays. Why should we choose to read something outside our destined interest? This sounds like picking a movie according to our taste, you might ponder. We simply go and buy the front-row seat tickets for the show that interests ourselves. Simple. The question is, who is going to buy the tickets in a doctor's life? Doctors or the patients? Honestly, doctors can never predict who will "buy the ticket" and come through the door of the clinics or hospitals. This reminds me again the gorgeous quote of Sir Geoffrey Vickers, "Even the dogs may eat of the crumbs which fall from the rich man's table; and in these days, when the rich in knowledge eat such specialized food at such separable tables, only the dogs have a chance of a balanced diet."

A healthy balanced diet helps to protect us from breaking a bone, I was told as a child.