[Doctor or technician? Reflections on the medical professional today]

Medicine is an outstanding example of an empirical science in theory and practice. In every stage of his work a doctor should be ready to pick up signs of possible scientific progress. Being constantly attentive and able to see anything new occurring, however difficult it may be to discern, should remain the basis of any professional commitment that takes care not to become sterile and thereby less effective in treating disease. A doctor is an experimenter par excellence, one who constantly applies experimental methods based on his own ''historical'' knowledge, experience, and capacity to comprehend even the tiniest signals that reach him from the real world. On the other hand, although the indiscriminate acceptance of results obtained by clinical trials and the increasing recourse to technology could herald the end of clinical freedom, we believe that such recourse to technology is, in fact, desirable. The reason for this belief is that a lack of innovation leads to loss of enthusiasm and loss of interest in specific clinical problems; it also results in a cultural attitude that refutes the notion of experimental logic being inherent in any treatment because of the changeability of individual conditions on a biological, clinical, and psycho-relational level.