Our Love Affair With Experts

Dr. Walter Freeman pioneered early neurology with a surgery he felt would help relieve patients with a whole host of symptoms.

He was an expert.

His intentions were grand. His results were tragic. He ended up creating one of the worst blemishes in the history of medicine. Dr. Freeman came up with the lobotomy – a brutal surgery that removed part of the brain and left scores of patents in a zombie-like state.

In the past century, medicine has been full of these stories. Experts thought that heroin was a good treatment for cough and fever. Fen-Phen was touted by experts as a miracle drug for weight loss but then was subsequently pulled from the market for causing heart valve defects in as many as a third of patents. ADHD was used by psychology experts to describe just about every abnormality of childhood. And hysteria was a catch-all “female disease” created by experts that showed far ranging symptoms such as faintness, irritability, and bloating, which led to some very interesting and embarrassing “cures.” 

It turns out that medical experts have quite a few blemishes from their past. But these blemishes are not just found in the medical field. Far from it. They are found literally in all human endeavors.

Yet what still remains is a stubborn and outdated logic as old as time. If someone is an expert, we tell ourselves they must know more than we do if they are the expert. They are to be listened to. They are to be trusted. But in today’s hyperconnected world that is ever-changing, ever-evolving, and moving at breakneck speeds, it takes creativity to question. To explore. To seek common sense and truth. Because without creativity, we are just “doing” without questioning.

Today, our experts tell us to do things like social distancing and self-isolating, quarantining, and wearing or not wearing masks. And while no doubt some of these things are important, when we look at things creatively, we begin to realize that the current crisis we are in will yield its mistakes as well – things we will look back at and think how horrendous our judgement was at the time! Why did we do that? What about the psychological impacts of shelter-in-place and isolation? Why did some countries shelter only vulnerable populations and decide on herd immunity for everyone else? What about the missed routine care that was disrupted by fear? It was only 30 years ago that smoking on an airplane was normal, and in the ’60s, pregnant women would drink alcohol! Our current situation is no different and will nonetheless yield some eye-popping embarrassments when looked back at 30 years from now.

But perhaps the most important part is that within these mistakes lies the potential for creative growth.

Mistakes can be the catalysts of things far larger and greater than we could have ever imagined.  It’s not about if mistakes will happen but instead when they happen and what we do with them. What we do with mistakes is far more important than what the mistake is in the first place. It turns out that making mistakes can pave a path for creativity – only if we are willing to look at our mistakes and find in them meaning. It’s not good enough anymore to plow forward without paying attention to our mistakes. Mistakes are like history; if you ignore them, you are bound to repeat them.  

So instead of pointing fingers like our politicians do, we should be looking carefully at the mistakes we are making and learning from them. There is a kernel of truth and creativity in each mistake, and the potential of each mistake to be the catalyst of something great is there. Right under our nose. We just have to make an effort to learn from them. No matter if we are in the medical field or in manufacturing.

The good news is that, by and large, all of the mistakes from medicine in the opening paragraph have been somewhat rectified. We thankfully no longer perform lobotomies. ADHD diagnosis has gone way down – perhaps not far enough for some, but there is progress. Heroin and cocaine are now scheduled as 1 and 2 drugs, respectively. Medicine – and humanity at large – has shown time and time again a willingness to look at mistakes and use them to see a better path forward. A better path forward that would have been impossible without creativity.