iRADiX

While examining the “Impartial spectators” one can try to see what other games are being played.

Game Theory
This is a branch of economics useful to study business behavior, concerned with representing economic interactions in a highly stylized form, with players, pay-offs and strategies.

For those esteemed readers who subscribe to “I-follow-Adam-Smith-not-Marx” (money-at-any-cost) Amartya Sen’s recently published book “The Idea of Justice” should be a must read. In this he teases out the confusions arising from the most famous and widely quoted passage from the Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

So we appointed ourselves as “Impartial Spectators”?!

Open and Closed Impartiality
The editors of the first edition of Harrison’s Principle of Medicine wrote “To the physician, as to the anthropologist, nothing human is strange or repulsive.”

And yet when one examines some of our current trends of practice, one does not feel comfortable at times.

There is a basic distinction of different ways of invoking impartiality, and that contrast needs more investigation. Who will be an impartial spectator in the context of a small child who comes for repeated follow-up CT scans ordered indiscriminately by the referring physician just because the patient is insured?