Uncertainty can be destabilizing, especially for a patient in the ER. When a patient tells me about their symptoms, they're asking for understanding and a way forward. They're asking for their suffering to be alleviated. In the healthcare system, that usually comes via a diagnosis.
How does a diagnosis alleviate suffering?
For one thing, it signals that an expert has acknowledged there is a problem, and furthermore that an expert, backed by many established institutions and authorities, has a way forward.
If there's no biomedical diagnosis, patients will often get upset. A diagnosis like "chest pain" or "abdominal pain" can be unsatisfying, as they don't tell the patient anything more than they already knew. They may wonder why they came to the ER in the first place.
I tell such patients that we have ruled out many emergencies such as x, y, and z, but we cannot always say what exactly the cause of their current experience is -- at least not from a biomedical prospective. That may come in time with a further evaluation, or it may not come at all, because the majority of our experiences are not best framed biomedically. That's why some of the most common diagnoses we see in the ER are simply repetitions of what the patient told us. Abdominal pain. Chest pain.
It is not that we are biomedical creatures. It is that we are creatures that can be partially understood through a biomedical lens.
What does that tell us about ourselves? How can we see ourselves better?
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