What Doctors & Farmers Should Have in Common

This winter I found myself in an emergency room with a major poison ivy issue. (later I found out that it was something else) It was late at night, and the ER doctor was a little bit insulting.

Have you ever run into a cocky doctor? You know, the kind that presumes that they are an apex human being? Everyone else is certainly stupid or inferior by comparison. They are presumptuous, arrogant and think too highly of themselves and their skills.

This is not my opinion of doctors in general. There have been several in my family, and I have a half dozen friends who have recently completed Med School. They are great. Most doctors are wonderful, caring people. However, I find it curious when I see arrogance creeping in through their career choice.

Dear doctors: Your profession is on par with the humble farmer. Don't believe me?

Consider these similarities.

1. You, like a farmer, work with a complex life-system that you yourself do not create. It is pre-existent to your role. Neither you nor the farmer can take credit for it. You are working on something that was created outside of your influence. You can seek to understand it, but you cannot take credit for the system itself. You are mechanics.

2. You, like the farmer, must play by the rules of that pre-existent system. There are pre-set limits to what can and cannot be done, there are extant processes and timings and interactions that happen within that system. Neither you nor the farmer can fundamentally alter them. Your lines of work enhance, help or coerce processes that are already possible. Occasionally, you might be able to alter or suppress them, but you cannot create new ones.

3. You, like the farmer planting his seeds, do not fully understand or control the life process. You are environmentalists; you can create the most favorable conditions for your desired result, but you cannot make that result happen.

The farmer turns the soil, fertilizes, plants the seed and waters all in the right time frame but then he must wait - and hope. If the seed itself does not germinate, he has wasted his efforts. For all his soil preparation, control of conditions and timing, he cannot make that seed do what he hopes it will. It is not determined by him. He is at it's mercy because he is not ultimately in control.

Can you see the similarities with the humble doctor? Is it a more complicated system? Yes. Granted, there is much study and knowledge to be acquired, but at its foundation, the doctor does all he can to create an environment favorable to healing and good health, but he does all that and waits. He hopes. He is also dependent on that pre-existent life system to do what it should.

He may aid, augment, replace, remove, medicate and manipulate but he still is dependent on the system itself.

Happily for us all, most times the seed does sprout, grow and mature. Happily for us the body often heals, responds and recovers. I am glad for the environmentalists who raise the likelihood of food and health, but I do not think that they (or we) should move past the reality that we are all dependent - no matter how much we know.

We are not the creator, we are gardeners - and this from the very start of it all.