The positive deviant

I have always been a ardent disciple of evidence based medicine, so much so that now I feel that I had lost the essence of being a physician and more importantly a human being. But now I have this realization, thanks to a two very awesome, but different, books; that maybe it was okay to be that way. Sometimes you have to walk through fire to re-invent yourself.

What though I am trying to decipher is why I was focused on the wrong side of the equation. Here we had a bell shaped curve of disease prevalence, mortality and morbidity; and all this while I was focusing on the median and the negative deviant from the median. Lost in the details of how that can be minimized and where we can make interventions to help the people in that group. Looking into the history of medicine and medical care, it seems, maybe we were always looking in the wrong direction; all this while the answer lies in the mystery of the positive deviant. And the purpose of every physician is to use his knowledge, training and skills to help his patients reach that stage of being a positive deviant.