You know I have found, especially as I grew older, that it's not only important to know things, but also to know the extent of your knowledge. Know what you know in other words. Because some people just don't know their own limitations. I had an uncle once for example, who knew a little about health food and alternative cures. And he thought that made him a doctor. But you know, speaking of medicine, the medical knowledge we have is just what doctors and people who know medicine think we need to know. When I was in my freshman year in HS a man came to tell us about working in the medical field. And he said something interesting. He said they were considering leaving out the subject of anatomy and human physiology for paramedics. Because they really didn't need to know that, to do their jobs. Physicians need to know that. A paramedic just needs to know how to save someone's life in most emergencies. And maybe to spot serious problems that others might miss. He used an interesting analogy. He said when you put a band aid on a wound, you don't need to know why. You just need to know how the procedure goes. First you wash it, then you dry it, and then you put a sterile band aid on it. You don't need know why medicine has determined that is the best way to do it. (Also, most doctors say you should then let the wound air dry at night. Who knows why even, like I said. But someone recently figured out that is the best way of doing it.)
I somewhat disagree. If you’re doing something with any intensity (a paramedic, let’s say), you do have to have a baseline as to what’s going on. If something doesn’t work with the band aid, it’s critical to assess what went wrong and why. Not just for the time for the patient in the ambulance, but then to communicate to the trauma team at the hospital as to what’s going on. But in less critical ventures, I kinda agree. You can’t know everything. Still, I think it’s good to at least create a good base of knowledge - if it’s not deep, then it might as well be wide. You can take one morsel of knowledge and integrate it into everything else you know, creating a bunch of connections, and a couple of other things hanging out in the ole gray matter might also fall into place. But, if you’re working retail or something is a superficial interest, then yeah, it makes sense not to really understand everything. I am of this persuasion with tech, which is less an interest than a necessity. I don’t spend time learning, and if I do learn something, it’s fairly utilitarian and understanding the mechanics or math behind it is thoroughly uninteresting at best.
When it comes to anything medical, the internet must be the most dangerous place on the planet. Some years ago, a site that was set up with good intentions to help people with drug addictions, moved on to prescription antidepressants. While reduction of their use is good, it needs to be under medical supervision. But then the unthinkable happened. A person who had undergone a cardiothoracic procedure known as TAVI (tanscatheter aortic valve implant) complained the the cocktail or warfarin taken 4 times a day was destroying their quality of life. Numerous people suggested either cutting it down or stopping altogether and comments started coming in about how much better they felt and how they could relax and sleep better. No one realised that they were feeling relaxed because their body was shutting down towards an inevitable death. The TAVI valve, being synthetic causes rejection tissue, so anticoagulants are vital to maintain the capillaries feeding the hearts own muscles open. The moment they fully blocked the patient was flatline and nothing could save them. The internet regulator took the site down. Today, the TAVI valve has a titanium cage to stretch the capillaries. The anticoagulant is 75mg of Aspirin per day and the prognosis has risen from 5 to 25 years plus.
