Chapter 10C Imagining medicine in a different perspective

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Chapter 10C

Imagining medicine in a different perspective.

I am quoting a TV documentary I saw more than 15 years ago. I am unable to find anything on the Net on it or leading to it. It was a young lady with full of enthusiasm.

She was trying to get mainstream doctors to see medicine in a different way.

Seeing the disease as a villain and looking through the villain's eyes.

Rather than learning a list of signs and symptoms, she asks what the disease would do or show. Know the enemy and then see the disease through its eyes.

Like Covid-19, try to understand it from the virus's point of view. How would it want to spread? How would it want to survive? As it enters the host, imagine you are the virus. You are small, you divide fast to evade the host's defence. You grow in the nasopharynx but have to move away as the host fights. Where do you go? Down the lungs. You cannot survive in the blood unless the host is compromised. Your genes are of a coronavirus, not a flavivirus. Not a HIV virus. There are things you can do and there are things you cannot do.

You want to survive and as a virus your best chance to survive is to proliferate fast and become more parasitic, rather than kill the host. So your offspring become more infectious but less virulent to the usual host. More asymptomatic carriers are the way to go.

Thinking in reverse is sometimes easier and then the signs and symptoms fits. However, when the aetiology is not known, this way of thinking may not work.

With this I end, and have nothing more to offer.

I dedicate this work to my patients, especially those who did not make it.

THE END (again, opps)

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