When I Lost My Intuition
March 06, 2025 at 12:00AMFollowing a vacation, Ronald W. Dworkin returns to work as an anaesthesiologist, carrying within him a feeling of uncertainty he had previously held off. “Some kind of inner harmony was gone,” he writes. For Aeon, Dworkin sketches a history of professional intuition, from the cultural attitudes that shape our conceptions to individual efforts to regain that inner harmony. He also brings us into the operating room, where an unlikely succession of complications—touched off by chewing gum, of all things—briefly bewilders him, a harrowing moment whose resolution remains enigmatic to the author.
That morning, I asked myself why my medical intuition, which, over the years, had struck its roots deep into the ground, had begun suddenly to hop about from place to place. The answer was terrible: although I still had all my professional knowledge and clinical experience, something had given way in my mind, a crack had opened, and I stared through a narrow black fissure into a void. I read five journal articles that discussed gum chewing and anaesthesia. Yet, the circumstances in each study were slightly different from my own case; also, the studies disagreed with one another. Even when clustered together to intensify their warm and comforting effect, to make medical practice seem well-ordered and predictable, five journal articles offer no guarantee, no sure thing. They are like stars in the night sky that shine bright, and warm the heart, and seem to give life secure limits, but nevertheless exist in that unnamable Nothing, the alien, cold and dark universe where people come face to face with the unknown. Nothing had really happened, but my anxiety aroused in me wild imaginings, and neither my knowledge nor my clinical experience could dispel them.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/03/05/when-i-lost-my-intuition/
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