Doctors Who Code: Progress through Abstraction Series, Part 1:

Doctors Who Code: Progress through Abstraction Series, Part 1 The integration of programming into medical practice is transforming the way healthcare professionals approach patient care. By leveraging coding skills, doctors can streamline processes, enhance data analysis, and improve diagnostic accuracy. This series will explore the various levels of abstraction in programming and how they apply to medical workflows. As healthcare technology evolves, understanding these concepts will become essential for doctors seeking to innovate in their fields. Join us as we delve deeper into the intersection of medicine and technology.

“Human ingenuity is bootstrapped.” — Sean McClure, Discovered Not Designed

Modern medicine and modern technology share a common secret: neither advances because people get smarter. We advance because we build smarter layers — scaffolds that make the next leap possible. This is the story of abstraction, and it’s the quiet engine driving both innovation and healing.

🧱 More Pieces, Bigger Bridges

Sean McClure begins Discovered, Not Designed with a deceptively simple analogy: building bridges.

A short bridge over a stream needs only a few beams and supports. But span a wide river, and suddenly you’re accounting for weight distribution, wind, vibration, temperature changes, and a dozen new variables. The bridge becomes a symphony of parts — beams, bearings, expansion joints, and foundations — all calibrated for resilience.

A small bridge across a stream requires just a handful of beams and supports. However, when crossing a broad river, you must consider factors like weight distribution, wind, vibration, temperature fluctuations, and many additional elements. The bridge transforms into a harmonious assembly of components — beams, bearings, expansion joints, and foundations — all designed for durability.

Medicine evolves in much the same way.
A country doctor in 1850 worked with a stethoscope, intuition, and a few handwritten notes. Today, a maternal–fetal medicine specialist like me navigates a digital ecosystem of ultrasound algorithms, genomics dashboards, EMRs, and machine learning models. More pieces. More connections. More data points that require synthesis.

The natural question follows: How are humans able to handle such exponential complexity?
We haven’t grown new neurons in the last century. We’re not smarter or working harder. What changed is how we think — and how we build.

We learned to package detail into layers.
We learned to abstract.

⚙️ Bootstrapped Intelligence

McClure argues that progress isn’t a function of intelligence — it’s a function of inheritance. Each generation begins not from zero, but from the highest abstraction level achieved by the previous one.

Programmers no longer write machine code in binary; they use languages like Python or JavaScript that hide the intricate details of memory management and hardware interaction. Each layer of abstraction saves mental bandwidth — freeing humans to focus on higher-order problems.

Medicine works the same way.
We stand on the abstractions of those before us:

The stethoscope abstracted the body’s internal sounds into interpretable signals.
The ultrasound abstracted anatomy into moving grayscale images.
AI abstracts terabytes of patient data into patterns and predictions.

Each tool folds the complexity of the last generation into a usable layer — letting us think higher.

🧠 Abstraction as the Doctor’s Superpower

Abstraction isn’t about hiding details. It’s about focusing genius.
When you code a diagnostic workflow or design a patient triage app, you’re building new layers of meaning — turning intricate details into reusable, elegant logic.

A line of code is a clinical insight turned into syntax.

Consider how a doctor reasons through a complex case:

At the lowest level, you interpret raw data — vitals, labs, ultrasound metrics.
At a higher level, you organize them into systems — cardiovascular, metabolic, endocrine.
Higher still, you form patterns: “Preeclampsia vs. chronic hypertension.”
At the highest level, you reason about goals and outcomes — “How can we prolong this pregnancy safely?”

That mental hierarchy is medicine’s version of machine code → assembly → procedural → object-oriented programming.
Each step abstracts the details to focus on relationships.

And that’s what makes Doctors Who Code uniquely positioned in this moment: we already think in abstractions.
We already translate the body’s complexity into structured layers of understanding.

🧩 The Great Bridge Between Code and Care

The bridge McClure describes — between the simple and the complex, the tangible and the abstract — is the same one doctors build every day between biology and logic.

When you write a simple Python function to calculate fetal growth percentiles, or use an AI tool to summarize a consultation, you’re not just coding — you’re constructing a bridge between two domains of thought: human reasoning and machine interpretation.

This bridge doesn’t replace expertise; it amplifies it.
It transforms the physician into what I call the architect of abstraction — someone who can traverse between clinical reasoning and computational expression with ease.

🌍 A New Kind of Progress

Our tools evolve faster than our brains, and that’s the point.
Abstraction lets us build systems so advanced that no single human could ever understand every line of code or every synapse of a neural network — and yet, through abstraction, we can use them, trust them, and improve them.

That’s how human progress scales.

McClure calls it bootstrapped ingenuity. I see it as the bridge builder’s art — taking what’s complex and turning it into something comprehensible, safe, and useful.

Doctors who code aren’t just learners of syntax; we’re custodians of this ancient pattern.
We’re building the next span across the river — one that connects knowledge, compassion, and computation.

🩺 Takeaway for the “Doctors Who Code” Community

Progress by abstraction means that your value isn’t in how much you know — it’s in how effectively you layer what you know.

Whether you’re:

Designing a clinical decision app,
Using voice dictation for AI-assisted notes, or
Teaching a resident how to think algorithmically—

You are participating in humanity’s oldest tradition: building bridges with ideas.

The challenge for this generation of physicians isn’t to work harder.
It’s to think higher.

Next in the Series:
🧠 From Machine Code to Medical Code: How Abstraction Shapes Clinical Reasoning and AI in Healthcare

In this evolving landscape, the ability to synthesize complex concepts into actionable insights is paramount. As we navigate the intersection of medicine and technology, we must elevate our thinking to forge innovative pathways that enhance patient care. By embracing abstraction, we empower ourselves to not only interpret the data but also to translate it into meaningful solutions that resonate within the healthcare community. This ongoing journey of knowledge expansion and connection is what will ultimately define our impact as modern bridge builders.