By: Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
03/18/2019
For centuries, medical procedures, prescriptions, and other medical interventions have been based largely on experience—what is known about a set of symptoms. The doctor looks at those symptoms, tests you in various ways (blood tests, X-rays, MRIs), and interprets the results based on experience with past patients or what is widely known in the medical community. Then she prescribes a treatment. There are two problems with this.
First, diagnosis relies on the doctor’s or medical profession’s interpretation of an examination and test results. Second, treatments themselves target populations, not people: This is the treatment that worked for most people in the past, so this treatment should work for you.
This isn’t to bad-mouth the medical or pharma community. But medicine has been, and still is, essentially statistical in nature. It’s based on populations, not individuals. That has been the most cost-effective way to treat the most people in the most efficient way possible. It hasn’t been possible, either technologically or, more important in terms of time, to test every patient for every possible pathogen that he might ever have been exposed to, or personally interview every family member to understand the patient’s family health history.