Now that I am out of active medical practice for me this is the time to stand back and offer my reflective experience after a long life in medicine supported with medical stories.
My aim is to highlight what seemed important in the practice of personalised medicine within general practice and other medical settings. Holly Ringland in her excellent novel The lost flowers of Alice Hart writes: ‘Life is lived forward but only understood backwards. You can’t see the landscape you’re in while you’re in it.’’
I see a medical profession and a society in which rational analysis is not necessarily balanced by intuitive knowledge. I wish to create a platform to allow discussion of rationality and intuition in medicine and my aim is to highlight that a failure to see the whole person, in their life situation, can lead to inappropriate investigation and medicalisation.
Dr David Beales 