Art of medical sciences | Online Tribune

“What hurts your body and hurts your soul?” With this unusual phrase I begin my consultation, leaving the patient smiling, thinking or curious. Medicine is done with science, intuition and insight.

Doctors treat diseases. But what is disease? “Now, is illness the absence of health?”

Circularly, we can also say: “Health is the absence of disease.” We are back to square one.

There are minor illnesses and illnesses that create a gap between the patient and the rest of the people. AIDS patients have already been discriminated against by society.

This shows how interpretation competes with the reality of facts.

Before treatment, the disease must be diagnosed. The doctor’s first step is always diagnosis. The patient arrives at the clinic bringing the complaint with him.

It is up to the doctor to decode it and turn it into a disease.

Sometimes the result is immediate, as happens in a broken bone or skin abscess, for example. You don’t even need to think too much. The distance between illness and complaint can be short.

However, it is necessary to avoid hasty judgments.

A trivial headache could be the tip of the iceberg of a harmful brain tumor.

In general, the process of diagnosis does not take place in one moment, as it involves a whole process of inference and deduction, which aims to find evidence.

It took medicine centuries to reach this point. First, she had to leave behind mysticism, magic, superstition, astrology, and belief in divine wrath.

When he recognized that there are many diseases, and that each of them has its own causes, science built medicine.

However, because signs and symptoms are rarely specific to a single disease, the diagnostic reasoning ends up facing a range of different possibilities. Fever, for example, is a common symptom of many diseases.

Different diseases that show the same signs and symptoms make diagnosis a mystery.

It is not common for him to allow himself to be fully armed; Parts are often missing. Other times the box comes with strange pieces that don’t fit into the set, because they belong to another container.

Diseases are the same, patients are different. Diagnosis is an activity that does not work well with absolute certainty.

Possibilities are always there. Pursuing a diagnosis is like making a sketch of a criminal.

If a witness can only describe him as a white man, with brown hair and average height, his contribution for the purposes of the investigation is minimal, as there are thousands of people with these characteristics.

If, by chance, another witness remembers that the wanted person, in addition to limping on his left leg, has a scar on his face, the possibility of him being the criminal becomes clearer.

Modern medicine has amazing technical resources. However, the tool that the doctor most needs to improve is himself.

João Evangelista Teixeira Lima is a general practitioner and gastroenterologist

| Photo: Archive/AT