Posted: Jun 13, 2010 6:08 pm
Arcanyn wrote:What does it actually mean "to treat the entire patient"? If we give someone antibiotics to kill the bacteria which have infected their toe, how is this deficient? Their problem is that there are a whole bunch of bacteria in their toe getting up to no good, and the antibiotics get rid of them. Once this is done, what more is there to do? Why do we need to 'treat the entire patient', when there's nothing wrong with the rest of the patient? It's like criticising the fire brigade for simply dealing with the one house that happens to be on fire, rather than 'treating the entire neighbourhood' that has no fire problems whatsoever.
Well I think it means that if the neighbourhood is surrounded by dry bush, has suffered a drought for 30 straight years and finds itself in the middle of a scorching summer, causation is multi-factorial. And at some point the fire brigade is going to look pretty clueless getting called out every week to the same 'isolated' fire, if they don't consider there may be causative factors of which they're unaware.
David