Putting people in boxes

I just finished readingThe Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, by Meghan O ' Rourke. She lived for many years with a debilitating illness that went undiagnosed. She ultimately concluded that she had chronic sequelae of Lyme disease, likely complicated by autoimmune and other manifestations that may have been triggered by Lyme disease or possibly just co-occurring coincidentally. In her desperation to find relief, or at least answers, she saw innumerable physicians and other practitioners, ultimately resorting to people with, shall we say, unorthodox ideas who many people -- I included -- would classify as quacks. She tried many remedies that she believed, or imagined, helped a bit, but she nevertheless continued to suffer pain and disability until she got substantive relief from antibiotic treatment. I ' m not going to try to summarize all of her experiences and insights, but I ' ll focus on the aspects of her experience that are most relevant to my own work. When confronted with complex symptoms that they don ' t understand and can ' t confidently label diagnostically, physicians are usually worse than unhelpful. When medicine established itself on a scientific basis in the late 19th through the 20th Century, it established an ideology and a corresponding process based on classifying people according to disease labels, and responding with a corresponding " treatment protocol. "  This fit well with the germ theory of disease that was the initial sci...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs