17 June

I have an occasional heart arrhythmia. Medicine has no idea with arrhythmias, there are some treatments that work ok, but nobody really understands what's going on. When I'm in hospital, like last week, I think about it. It seems to me it's a perfect example of how modern medicine slices the body up into billable bits, allocated to different specialists, who get rich focusing on that bit of you in isolation. My hunch is arrhythmias are, as the name suggests, a problem with rhythms in the body. Not just rhythms of the heart, but rhythms of everything you're doing, including breathing, movement etc. Rhythms of the body in activity, in everyday life. The conditions medicine struggles most with are the ones that should be forcing it to change its way of thinking about things. Oh, and hospitals. I'm sorry, but they're about as healing as hitting yourself in the head with a claw hammer. Another way medicine and patients should stop and think.