As as experiment, make a series of appointments with medical professionals, describing a part of your condition and medical history at every appointment.
Then, observe the effect your partial medical history oratory has on the attempt of a medical diagnosis.
Keep in your thoughts the fact that your complete medical record set is available to each professional in turn.
Of course, specialists will tend to focus on your malady in reference to their specialty.
Can you see a pattern emerge?
Will you receive a “true” diagnosis based on the state-of-the-art in medical practice today?
Let’s say, for a hypothetical example, that you have a throat-clearing problem which recently developed into the lack of ability to find common words in your vocabulary and then devolved into the inability to speak or swallow, which may or may not have anything to do with the “thrush” or tongue infection you can display easily.
At the same time, your garden variety of medical experts has prescribed a handful of medication to consume on a daily basis, some of the medicines requiring close monitoring (every two to three days) but your doctors only see you every two to three weeks. In addition, some of the medicines have been shown to have moderate side effects or known contraindications for not prescribing together in the first place.
On top of all that, one or two members of your family have experienced episodes of severe depression but up into your late 70s, you have not (yet).
You end up not being able to eat for several days after weeks of eating very little, losing a lot of weight and getting admitted to a hospital emergency room due to malnutrition and dehydration.
After a few days, a PEG tube is put in your stomach and passed through your abdomen wall for nourishment.
Therefore, a few of the medical professionals think you may have had:
- a stroke,
- myasthenia gravis,
- fungal infection,
- negative drug interaction response,
- ALS bulbar option, sudden onset,
- geriatric depression,
- dementia,
- some mix of all of the above, and/or
- to be determined.
I know there’s a comedy skit just waiting…no, begging to be written about the above situation but I can’t imagine it because my face is up against the bark of a tree and I can’t see the surrounding forest shading me from the bright light shining on the world’s greatest medical calamity sketch.
I can use testing to eliminate the first two options above. For some reason, the third option isn’t going away. The remaining options are testable to some extent. The fifth is a death sentence no doctor wants to give.
I can solve the perceived problem of world hunger (provide a Green Revolution to many parts of the world and accept that no distribution system will prevent the death of millions in some parts of the world due to political instability and wealth inequality).
I can send Earth-based lifeforms to other celestial bodies.
Yet, here in the landmark year of 2012, I can’t get a panel of medical professionals to agree to a diagnosis for my father’s current, finite set of bodily conditions.
If I hear yet another specialist say, “Well, I can’t determine your father’s condition because it requires a different specialist,” I think I’ll toss the whole medical profession into the category of high-falutin’ quackery and call it a day.
Reminds me of the recurring thought of mine that our transportation devices long ago reached their point of maximum usefulness and have succumbed to the concept of feature creep that dooms every product to creative oblivion.
The guru in me told me a story (the previous phrase is a literary device so just go with it)…
Long ago, your ancestors looked at the raging storms, the swelling seas, the spewing volcanoes and said, “This is how the gods communicate with us. We must figure out a way to respond.”
Not so long ago, your ancestors figured out how to send message via smoke signals and said, “The gods created us. Thus, by learning to communicate via smoke signals to each other, it must be the same way that we can communicate with the gods.”
Recently, your ancestors developed “invisible” radio signal communication technology and said, “Gods are inventions of ours. They were alien to our less sophisticated level of understanding the universe. Theoretically, aliens exist, maybe in godlike status to our modern-day level of understanding; if they exist nearby, they must have evolved to our point of advanced civilisation at one time in their evolution; therefore, let’s use radio signals to send messages to aliens and listen for them on our radiowave receivers, hoping that our civilisations are in similar stages of evolution.”
Today, your contemporaries not only use radiowave transceivers but also lasers to communicate across the solar system and say, repeating your ancestors’ way of thinking, “If our galaxy is teeming with advanced technological life, it has lasers crisscrossing it—tens of thousands, millions of them—and we should be able to pick up some spillover. Also, some aliens are going to try to communicate with us. Maybe they are literally pointing their lasers at us and we just aren’t looking.”
That just as easily explains the way medical science looks to me at a 1000-year perspective from now. We have not mastered the connections between subatomic, atomic, molecular and life science systems, still basing our theories on unproved/misguided theories of the past.
Time to crawl back into my cave and contemplate the formation of limestone deposits, watching the life of our planet change one…slow…drop…at…a…time.
13,906 days to go…sigh…
treetrunkdings 