Why Medicine Needs More Creative Thinking

Medicine is rough these days, especially if you show up with something other than a broken bone or a condition that lights up cleanly on a lab report.

I brought Jarmo with me to an appointment with a new endocrinologist because
a) unfortunately, having a male man-type still helps in medical settings, and
b) I don’t think he realized just how little space there is for complexity.

And, like clockwork, the doctor said something like:

If you fit into these five checkmarks, I’m trained to treat that. If not, I can’t really help you.

Or something close to that. I might have had steam coming out of my ears by then, so I stopped tracking the exact phrasing. But the message was clear:

Your body is complicated.
My system is not built for complicated.

I get it. Systems — what I’d call the second layer — scale by narrowing. Specialization exists for a reason. You can’t know everything.

But we’re at an inflection point — in medicine, climate, water, AI, everything — where narrow thinking is starting to fail us.

Automation was great.

Until it wasn’t.

Bodies aren’t kidneys + nervous systems + gallbladders + brains + life experience stacked neatly beside each other. They’re overlapping, dynamic, contextual humans. Everything affects everything.

We. Need. To. Think. Deeper.

More complexity. More dot-connecting. More detective, less mechanic.

Because AI can outrun us in speed and pattern recognition. That’s not the competition. The competition is whether we remember how to see context. How to hold contradiction. How to notice what doesn’t fit neatly inside five boxes.

That’s human work.