The Age of Diagnosis
I got this book from “People I Mostly Admire” Episode 153 (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast…) where the authoress was a guest and I found what she had to say very interesting.
The thesis can be condensed down to “We’re not really getting sicker, its just that our diagnosis tools are getting better and sometimes maybe its not worth getting a diagnosis if there isn’t much you can do about it”. This central thesis was worth checking out in more detail and the book really goes into this.
At the heart of it, medical science is getting better at finding what we’re afflicted with, but in many cases, the diagnosis of it is far in advance of there being any effective treatment of it. Allergies are a great example of this. We can find out what you’re allergic to, but there’s no treatment that will make your allergies go away. We can treat the symptoms of it, like, say an Epipen, but that’s not going to prevent your allergies from trying to kill you.
This is true for a lot of illnesses like Cancer and also for mental illnesses. We’re far better at finding out what is wrong with you than to be able to treat you. Its also true that a lot of times we DO get better by ourselves (the human body is an amazing healing machine), so what we see of as treatment is mostly just treating symptoms and waiting for your own body to heal yourself.
The authoresses’s main argument is mostly that the medical field should really think a lot about over diagnosing and sometimes even think about withholding diagnosis if there is nothing to be done about treating the underlying condition. This is fairly profound and alien to me mostly because I prefer to know as much about whats wrong with me and then make a decision myself and I suspect most humans are the same way. Its better to know, even if I know there’s no cure.
However, her points about how those diagnosis could then color future treatments or color dr behavior with the existing patient is a good point. If someone is known to be a pathological liar, future doctors would be silly to believe blindly whatever that someone says. At the end of the day, this is a very difficult conundrum that is probably impossible to solve, mostly because we’re humans. I suppose that’s a bit of a pithy statement as you can boil that down to say every problem is hard to solve or impossible because humans are irrational.
In any case, the book is quite excellent and I suspect the authoress is suspicious of her own thesis because she doesn’t make the case for her own arguments very well. It IS a difficult issue to look at and come up with a good thesis because there are so many exceptions and you have to treat every patient as its own unique case, which is very difficult to do.
Worth reading for at least the chapters on Cancer diagnosis and treatment, and depression. Well worth the 2 or 3 hours this book will take you to read.make the most of my time left” that impressed me the most. I got this book from “People I Mostly Admire” Episode 153 (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast…) where the authoress was a guest and I found what she had to say very interesting.
The thesis can be condensed down to “We’re not really getting sicker, its just that our diagnosis tools are getting better and sometimes maybe its not worth getting a diagnosis if there isn’t much you can do about it”. This central thesis was worth checking out in more detail and the book really goes into this.
At the heart of it, medical science is getting better at finding what we’re afflicted with, but in many cases, the diagnosis of it is far in advance of there being any effective treatment of it. Allergies are a great example of this. We can find out what you’re allergic to, but there’s no treatment that will make your allergies go away. We can treat the symptoms of it, like, say an Epipen, but that’s not going to prevent your allergies from trying to kill you.
This is true for a lot of illnesses like Cancer and also for mental illnesses. We’re far better at finding out what is wrong with you than to be able to treat you. Its also true that a lot of times we DO get better by ourselves (the human body is an amazing healing machine), so what we see of as treatment is mostly just treating symptoms and waiting for your own body to heal yourself.
The authoresses’s main argument is mostly that the medical field should really think a lot about over diagnosing and sometimes even think about withholding diagnosis if there is nothing to be done about treating the underlying condition. This is fairly profound and alien to me mostly because I prefer to know as much about whats wrong with me and then make a decision myself and I suspect most humans are the same way. Its better to know, even if I know there’s no cure.
However, her points about how those diagnosis could then color future treatments or color dr behavior with the existing patient is a good point. If someone is known to be a pathological liar, future doctors would be silly to believe blindly whatever that someone says. At the end of the day, this is a very difficult conundrum that is probably impossible to solve, mostly because we’re humans. I suppose that’s a bit of a pithy statement as you can boil that down to say every problem is hard to solve or impossible because humans are irrational.
In any case, the book is quite excellent and I suspect the authoress is suspicious of her own thesis because she doesn’t make the case for her own arguments very well. It IS a difficult issue to look at and come up with a good thesis because there are so many exceptions and you have to treat every patient as its own unique case, which is very difficult to do.
Worth reading for at least the chapters on Cancer diagnosis and treatment, and depression. Well worth the 2 or 3 hours this book will take you to read.