Extracts of the article:
'Indeed, Galen titled one of his volumes That the Best Physician Is also a Philosopher. The division between humanism and science is recent, an Enlightenment idea, a Cartesian duality, and like many such ideas, it served at first to advance a discourse it may now impede. The two modes of thought are now too often posed as opposites rather than as twin vocabularies for the same reality.'
'But medical writing of today has its own complexion. As medical information has become increasingly technical, patients are asked to trust what they cannot comprehend. Recondite information complicates their already anguished experience of poor health. In a bid for control, such patients seek the logic behind their ailments and the proposed cures. More than that, they seek to use available knowledge to make basic decisions about the value of their own lives and those of the people they love. They need this information in order to resolve dialectical thoughts about mortality and intervention, pleasure and pain, quality and length of life.
A rising literature attempts to reconcile these modes of thought. Voltaire complained, “Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing.”'
One of the comments:
Some diseases make their recognition and diagnosis especially hard to achieve.
I am thinking very much of one which is close to me, but some aspects apply readily to others.
Hypothyroidism results in numerous issues including what so many sufferers call brainfog. Formal descriptions include term like "slow mentation". The impact of inadequate thyroid hormone on the brain and mind, the senses, even the very self that is at the core of being, is such that many do not get their disease recognised.
The sufferer may realise something isn't right and even look for medical help. But they are often told it is age, depression, or other issue. This can go on for many years - possibly going back and forth to the doctor, or accepting that there is nothing wrong which can be treated. Their ability to see what they are themselves going through can be severely compromised. Still more compromised is their ability to convince others. Words stop arriving at the end of the tongue, ready for despatch when needed. Memory fails to see the deterioration, even on the occasions that it is fast.
The word insidious could have been created expressly for the almost invisible way that hypothyroidism creeps up and overtakes.
How could anyone describe this with any amount of lucidity? Every cell of the body requires thyroid hormone. Without an adequate supply, every system of the body deteriorates. The eyesight which allows us to see lucidly when well, cannot cope with foussing, oncoming headlamps, proper colour.
Yet despite the long list of symptoms (you can easily find lists if many dozens of symptoms - all of which have been reported in medical literature, not just the figments of what is left of the sufferer's imagination), even the best doctors hardly ever even think of hypothyroidism.
So, yes, the ability to describe lucidily to an alert doctor would be a major benefit, but is all too often impossible.
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