My wife recently had a fairly serious operation performed by a maxillofacial consultant. Whilst the procedure went well, recovery has been more difficult than she or I expected, marred by unexpected swelling and discomfort. What has struck me, both in the consultations we had prior to the operation and the emergency consultation after it, has been the ways in which the experts have presented their expertise as opinion.

Of course, on one level (epistemological) I can recognise that medical knowledge is built on educated guesswork, a series of deductions tested and corroborated by experimental and experiential evidence. I can also appreciate a species of postmodern skepticism about the nature of absolute truth. But at the same time I’m surprised that the ‘experts’ no longer profess their expertise. Instead they proffer their opinions and lay out the options that emerge from them. What option to choose remains the domain of the patient. But how to choose? Do A or not do A? Do A or do B? It’s the patient’s choice. On one level it’s very flattering. I can choose. Presumably, this is what is meant by ‘empowering’. But is it really empowering? Could it be instead that the power of the expert is somehow being played down, or even displaced as if it were somehow embarrassing or perhaps a liability? And isn’t the affect to burden the patient with a weight of responsibility that they are really not in an epistemological position to shoulder?

Ulrick Beck was the first to draw attention to the novelty and ambiguity of the term ‘expert opinion’. The philosopher Slavoj Zizeck made the point in a recent interview on Newsnight that when he was young, experts didn’t have opinions,  they knew things – only commonsense idiots had opinions. The irony is that in a world increasingly dominated by science, the discourse of opinion is ubiquitous.

So what do we do? I don’t propose some return to the ‘Doctor’ as all-knowing authority to whom we submit unthinkingly. But there ought to be mechanisms for relieving the burden of choice. What we did – and I wonder how many others do the same in similar circumstances – was to ask: ‘and what would you do Doctor if you were treating your wife in this condition?’ At that point and with what seemed like some relief, expert knowledge came to the fore and decisions more easily taken.