(John Irvine was the editor of The The Health Care Blog who brought my work to that platform. His new endeavor is “The Deductible”, where this piece appeared this weekend.)
“Take mood”, I continued. “At one end of the mood spectrum there is depression and at the other there is what we call mania. Sometimes that looks like exaggerated happiness and confidence, but sometimes it is more like irritability and agitation. We can all experience any one of those moods, but usually we are somewhere in the middle. So, people are making up disease definitions depending on how far and for how long we deviate from the middle. But if we never move an inch from neutral, that’s not necessarily being healthy – I think of that as definitely abnormal.”
“I see what you mean”, he nodded again.
“As a clinician, I think of labels as a type of shorthand or mental image that I keep in mind when I approach a problem. They help me choose treatments and they help me explain things. But I tend to be slow in sticking labels on patients or in their medical records. I read a book once called ‘Shadow Syndromes’ that makes the point that looking at the extremes of whatever spectrum we are on helps us understand ourselves and can be very empowering.”
“So, Doc, do you think I’m bipolar?” He leaned forward.
https://thedeductible.com/2020/07/18/arent-we-all-somewhere-on-the-spectrum-of-disease/
A Country Doctor Writes: 
0 Responses to “Aren’t We All Somewhere On the Spectrum of Disease? – The Deductible”