This is a very important subject and I do not wish to ‘land’ it on Planet Trivia, yet there are others besides children who are also dependent on their screens and to be honest, I read the article title1 as applying to many GPs in the UK. Many of the public, including myself, are really fortunate to be registered with many an excellent and caring GP and there is a technology in the consultation room that perhaps we are increasingly in danger of abandoning, namely the billions of mirror neurones that rely on visual information to generate empathy and rapport with patients. Every glance away at a computer screen or worse, being serially embedded in it, for reasons of QOF, personal acopia, or lost or never-present skills, represents the placement of this required and increasingly essential human brain-derived technology in front of those that have derived from the human brain — once described as the ‘most complex mechanism in the known universe’.
And why, anyway, in this day and age do we not have Head-Up Touch-sensitive Displays (perhaps they could be called Eye-Pads?) being used routinely in healthcare settings, together with abandonment of the 1868 QWERTY keyboard and 1946 mouse?
As Einstein said:
‘The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.’
In this context, I would say that it is time to ‘re-mind’ the rational mind that it and all its derivatives are respected for their servitude, while being kept firmly in their place.
- © British Journal of General Practice 2015
REFERENCE
- 1.↵