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Have You Considered the Possibility
For eight seasons beginning in 2004, Dr. Gregory House was TV’s medical superstar.
Just as Perry Mason never lost a case in court, the star of House always managed to solve even the most puzzling medical mysteries.
British actor Hugh Laurie feigned an American accent in order to play the surly, prescription drug-addicted, unconventional genius. People paid attention. In 2008 House was the most watched TV program on the planet.
Week by week Dr. House would lead a team of diagnosticians at a fictional teaching hospital. The brightest and best doctors would inevitably falter, but House would always find the missing microbe, rogue cancer cell, or symptomatic anomaly that would crack the case.
He was a savant – a human search engine with an insufferable ego. Even though he never appeared to do the least bit of research, he was always right.
What we can safely say is that turning loose a Gregory House is no way to run a real-world healthcare system. The need of the hour is not a Sherlockian genius in every hospital but an assured means by which doctors and patients alike can have easy access to what we have already learned.
Enter the diagnostic power of Isabel Healthcare.
In 1999, Jason Maude’s three-year-old daughter Isabel was misdiagnosed with chicken pox in London. Ultimately doctors realized she was being consumed instead by flesh-eating bacteria. Isabel recovered, but Maude was shaken. Shouldn’t there be a means by which caregivers could have, at their fingertips, every diagnostic insight from the global medical community?
Maude quit his job as a stockbroker and launched a software system that he named for his daughter.
With Isabel, both doctors and patients can take advantage of digital super-crunching. “Computers are better at remembering things than we are,” says Maude. If you enter a patient’s details into the Isabel Symptom Checker, the software utilizes dozens of algorithms to cut through the forest of available data on more than 6,000 diseases. Isabel researches tens of thousands of articles on obscure conditions and takes into account thousands of possible drug interactions.
According to Isabel’s website: “It will change the way you speak to your doctor forever.” In a world in which patients are increasingly more informed and engaged about their own diagnoses, the availability of such information can be transforming.
Maude is quick to point out that Isabel is not a magic Answer Machine, nor an online version of an all-wise Yoda. Isabel simply lays out the possibilities. It points out pathways that are worth exploring, including things that may never have occurred to the diagnostician.
Isabel’s power lies in the fact that it raises a simple yet powerful question: Have you considered the possibility…?
We can’t afford to surrender to what we think we already know. That’s true in our family rooms, our workplaces, and our hearts. We must find the courage to ask ourselves that extra question:
Have you considered the possibility that your spouse or partner is right, but you’re too stubborn to admit it?
Have you considered the possibility that you didn’t really understand what your colleague was trying to communicate at that meeting?
Have you considered the possibility that there’s a better way to frame the problem you’re trying to address right now?
Have you considered the possibility that you’re off the mark this time, even though you pride yourself on always being right?
Have you considered the possibility that God is trying to get your attention, even though you’re not sure God is real?
“Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up” (James 4:10).
Hollywood loves superheroes and super-doctors who always get everything right.
You don’t have to be super.
Just be humble enough and brave enough to consider the possibility that you don’t yet know everything you need to know.