Echos from my heart (yeah I vomited in my mouth a little too)

Part of my job is to read echocardiograms: ultrasound images of the moving heart.  The machine sends out sound waves which bounce off an object (red blood cell, cardiac cell, polish sausage if you're Chris Farley) and returns.  The machine measures how long it takes for the return trip and calculates the position of the object.  It then marks it with a dot on a screen.  Movement is simulated by the temporal coordination of flashing dots (in other words the movement is in my head and not on the screen).

What my patients see are flashing dots with a fuzzy 2D animation of something.  The most adroit may even see some semblance of a heart.  What my residents see are isolated images of various aspects of a poorly defined organ.  What I see is a detailed map of the heart laid out in 3D outlining subtle normalities and abnormalities.  I tell my residents that it isn't really something I can teach.  You see enough and you just kind of get it.  Like an autostereogram in which you are looking at a bunch of wavy lines then, magically, a boob pops out (you're probably wondering where I found my autostereograms and what exactly the "auto" part stands for).  Or like the dirty, smelly guys with the shitty lives because they saw no "honor" in living life as a lie in the Matrix (I would have taken the blue pill) who could see Keanu's crappy acting and clumsy karate on a screen that the rest of us only saw 1s and 0s.

The point is there is something intangible - even unintelligible - to our perception.  Take a book for example.  A series of dots make up what you perceive as a letter that, when strung together with other dot-laden letters, forms a word then a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, and a book.  But it is all a series of dots whether its this bullshit blog or the bible.  Perception is interpretation; the two are inextricably linked.  The fallout of this is objectivity is impossible (at least how we commonly define it).  Our knowledge is based on error prone perception (sorry Plato, but I fall on the "nuture" side of nature vs. nuture when it comes to knowledge; action is a different story entirely).  The scientific method is empirical at it's heart.  So the "medical method" is as well and therefore must be equally as subjective.  (Shit, thanks to Einstein we can't even agree on time and space!)  When I take care of you as your physician, your disease and its treatment do not live in an objective world.  I can't tell you is true.  I can only tell you what fits our shared subjectivity.