Presentation of article «Science and clinical» by Javier Peteiro Cartelle

[Automatic translation from Spanish]:

Javier Peteiro Cartelle (A Coruña, 1953) has a Bachelor of Medicine from the University of Santiago de Compostela in 1975 with a distinction and has a PhD in Medicine cum laude from the same university in 1987.

Specialist in Clinical Analysis and Head of Biochemistry Section at the Hospital Complex of Coruña (CHUAC), where he has been working for 46 years since his inception as a resident.

Throughout this time, he developed mainly care and teaching activity in the laboratory and research on aspects of immunochemistry and biophysics, focusing on effects of temperature and magnetic fields on kinetic cell and cytogenetic, as well as incursions into nanomedicine. He has been secretary general of the Official College of Doctors of the Province of Coruña from 1998 to 2005.

For several years now, he has been collaborating with Lacanian psychoanalysts in meetings and publications, including some compilation books such as The Inhuman Sciences and The Watch Society and its Criminals (both in Gredos editorial), The Real Awakening, in the 21st century (Grama) and Your self is not your (Tres Haches). He is also the author of several scientific articles published in national and international journals; among others: Clinical Journal of Spain, Galicia Clinical, The Doctor, Journal of Bioelectricity, Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition, Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation, American Journal of Kidney Diseases, Cytobios, Peritoneal Dialysis International, Burns y Nanomedicine. He has published Scientific Authoritarianism, a critique of the excess scientificist, and Science Aesthetics, where he enhances the value of science to reveal the beauty of the world and also the elegance of good scientific method. He has just published A Look at Science, Medicine and Spirituality (Xoroi Editions).

In September 2022 he was invited to the first day of the Psychoanalysis Commission of the COPC with the report «Clinical and Science. Current Triviality». The writing that he offers to us, “Science and Clinical”, retrieves something from the work on it.

The article explains the relationship between science and clinic in the field of health, for which he reviews the scientific approaches to the disease, highlighting the aspects where un-subjectivization, numerical and statistic, become the governing scientific knowledge of health.

Javier Peteiro shows very clearly not only this journey but also how the results that are scientifically validated are decided. Thus, the reductionism of information, atomism, the triumph of the discrete over the continuum, all of which must be measurable, are the scientific tics that, belonging to the order of the philosophical, have become the truth of science. It makes clear to us very evidently the importance of the language used, the interpretation biases of the results and even the misrepresentation of the results in order to reach conclusions that are not always honest.

It shows us with great skill that the consequence in the field of health involves abandoning the specificity of the clinic that is “It is not the disease but the patient” and the loss of subjective attention in the name of merely validating quantifiable data and the information that these offer.

He encourages us to work on psychoanalytic care, considering that we still find in it the attention of human subjectivity and the clinic.

It is an excellent article, and it is essential to understand all this. I hope that you can enjoy it as much as I have.

Marisa Ara Comin
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