Posted: Jun 16, 2010 5:15 am
DST70 wrote:GenesForLife wrote:The people who come and spout crap about heterogeneity are often the ones who have no idea about the near-identical pathways of disease progression involved in particular diseases, this is why "rationalist" medicine fucking works.
Perhaps, but there's a few people on this thread - as well as GPs - to whom this would be news indeed. The people "spouting crap" are often patients who mysteriously return to the doctors surgery again and again, despite having received treatment that maps their near "identical pathways of disease progression".
I'm interested to hear why you think that happens?
Lack of resolution of diagnostic techniques, because even though the pathways of disease are identical, they often tend to overlap in the symptoms they cause, therefore, treatment is often based on the most likely diagnosis based on observed symptoms, so say, for instance, Dengue and other fevers may still result in fever, and the symptoms look the same, but Dengue can only be identified by specific diagnoses based on reduced platelet counts.
The reason that people keep coming back is that they received treatment based on the diseases indicated by the observed symptoms, which can overlap as the manifestations of the pathological effects of many particular diseases, this automatically does not, in any logically consistent universe, mean that the pathways of disease are heterogenous.
To put it simply, similar symptoms and signs may appear due to different diseases, but each disease has its own pathway of causation and progression,which is common to patients who suffer from the same disease, and "rationalist" medicine is capable of dealing with these diseases once they are diagnosed correctly and the perceived "problem" with heterogeneity is not in the latter, but in the former, which is increasingly being resolved by ever improving diagnostic methods.
Care to make the distinction?