Correct Diagnosis and Treatment

In contemporary medical practice and in the public mind, there exists a kind of "looseness" between the correctness of a diagnosis and the efficacy of treatment. A diagnosis is sometimes held (by the patient) to be correct or understood by medical science even in the absence of results from treatment. Often, a name and a description are given to a malady (such as "arthritis," "bursitis," "fibromyalgia," "aging," "chronic pain syndrome," "erectile dysfunction," "TMD", -- name yours), and the act of naming (diagnosis) and describing the symptoms a malady are confused with understanding its causes and are held as sufficient justification to charge the patient a fee.

This state of affairs is inevitable when no effective treatment exists for a malady; however the absence of an effective treatment points to a failure of understanding of the malady diagnosed. This state of affairs often pertains to chronic medical complaints, in general.

A correction of understanding is needed: If a malady has been correctly diagnosed and is understood correctly, a course of treatment based upon that understanding will provide the desired relief.

Unfortunately, too often the treatment applied fails to provide relief and people accept this state of affairs. Instead of questioning the diagnosis or the treatment, people often accept the idea that the malady is just "difficult to treat" or "slow to respond."

Acceptance of these ideas shows a willingness to proceed without understanding - the habit of haphazard living. It is unfortunate, but people seem to assume that medical matters are inevitably beyond their understanding (the failure to seek and acquire understanding possibly a fault in their education, in general); even more bizarrely, people sometimes assume that if something seems too easy to understand, it must be wrong or not up to the level of a "professional understanding."

This acceptance of obscurity is compounded by the tendency of science and medicine to emphasize the microscopic - enzymes, hormones, chemistry, cellular behavior, etc., and the complexity of their interactions. These "microscopia" are the "trees" that, when made the primary object of study, distract one from seeing the "forest", the grand pattern that simplifies the entire view. Microscopia overwhelm the mind with details hard to understand.

So, in short, conventional medicine is sometimes incompetent to treat certain kinds of conditions, and people are reluctant or unaccustomed to recognize that incompetence because of the professionalism of the profession and presumed difficulty involved in understanding things - regardless of the lack of success of treatment.

To recognize the sign of incompetence to deal with certain conditions would instantly liberate people to pursue remedies outside of conventional medicine. Unfortunately, the tendency to proceed without understanding leaves people prey to quackery and skeptical of understandable, elegant solutions to their problems.

Clarity comes with a return to this simple observation: if the diagnosis is correct and correctly understood, the treatment selected is correct, and if the treatment is correct, relief follows. If not, something is incorrect. Getting this viewpoint is, for some, a leap into understanding. It's not for the mentally lazy, however.

So, my final words to you are, "If you haven't gotten relief from treatment, either the diagnosis or the treatment is incorrect. Seek another understanding of the situation and approach it from another direction."