There are numbers used everywhere these days. Numbers are important, but they have their specific utility. Life is not all about numbers!! For example, clinical medicine has become a number game….but nothing can replace a true and good clinical judgment, a history well taken, and a thorough and detailed physical exam… Many doctors see patients in 5 min or less and don’t even know their names….Medicine is about patient care, we don’t see it often enough these days…
In relation to Brain Imaging, numbers are very important, even more important than in clinical practice, but we have to step back and allow our intelligence and creativity to work as well and not only become machine operators…..
We as humans tend to go to extremes. Numbers have become better used in research and medicine but I think we are now going to the other extreme and looking everything from a number perspective, which can be very dangerous.
Adolfo Cotter, MD
Dec 24/2010
