Posted: Jun 16, 2010 9:59 pm
GenesForLife wrote:Of course, it is also prudent to note that diagnostic methods aren't targeted against a 1:1 mapping of symptoms to disease either, symptoms are just a set of observations that are employed to narrow down the range of suspected causative phenomena, and that is all that is required, or used, for the vast majority of cases involving the prescription of conventional medicine, it only runs into problems, when, as you say, there isn't an obvious physical connection between a pathology and symptoms, which is a gap science is attempting to fill up with ever improving diagnostics, cue, for instance, PCR for tuberculosis diagnosis.
I think this is the crux of it - whether those observations are indicators of underlying pathology or whether they count as meaningful empirical data in their own right. If symptoms are seen only as pointers to underlying pathology, it doesn't account for the variance from case to case, from patient to patient. Plus, like I mentioned before, there should be a plausible account for why those symptomatic observations are, in themselves, not relevant to the disease.
thanks.