The pathogenic cultural-cognitive-emotional-existential logic in otolaryngology training and care

Abstract

This essay it is the result of the courses system “Think what thinks us” designed to learn how to critically diagnose and think about the cultural, cognitive, emotional, and existential logics that operate in professional and personal practice. It applies the core categories of the program -pathogenic cultural-cognitive-emotional-existential reason, cognitive-emotional-existential blindness, cognitive-emotional-existential scarcity, and bioethics as a breeding ground for pathogenic logics -to the analysis of ENT teaching practice and care, based experience by the authors. Manifestations of these logics are identified in residents and specialists. It delves into the theory of cognitive scarcity -the tunnel and bandwidth- and links it with the structural and sustained scarcity of the Cuban context, which generates suffering, exhaustion and chronic narrowing, extending the analysis to the emotional and existential dimensions. The historical predominance of medical paternalism and traditional biomedical fundamentalism is contextualized, in contrast to the scant explicitation of critical bioethics in Latin America and Cuba. It is concluded that the pathogenic cultural-cognitive-emotional-existential reason operates silently in ENT training and care, producing a blindness that prevents seeing its effects; that sustained scarcity reduces cognitive bandwidth, emotional and existential of residents and professionals. That bioethics can reproduce these logics if not critically exercised. Think what thinks us allows us to unfold them and substantiate the transformations.