Thursday, March 26, 2009
Musings
Whereas,
in ancient China it was considered bad form for a lady of any standing to let the doctor see more than a hand, the rest of her being concealed behind a curtain. Partly because of this, Chinese doctors can diagnose all kinds of surprising things from your finger nails. I recall that ridges running up and down the nail are bad, maybe something to do with kidneys. Presumably doctors' wives did not have any standing, by definition, and so they could get with their lives without worrying too much about this particular form;
in present-day France I believe that doctors will try to explain all problems in terms of livers, while in Germany doctors will try to explain all problems in terms of hearts; and,
as noted in a previous posting, the same basic processes make toenails and livers tick.
I get to musing. If one has some kind of a health problem, it is quite possible, likely even, that there has been some disturbance of one of these basic processes. In some organs, the disturbance may not be material. In others, there may be symptoms. Sometimes one has to do something about a symptom. Perhaps because the symptom is pain somewhere or perhaps because the symptom - say the thickening of artery in some important part of the body - might have untoward consequences. It then might be that the disturbance which results in thickening of the artery also results in a recognisable pattern on the toenail of the big toe on the left foot. In which case, sorting out the toenail might also sort out the artery, provided only that the sorting out goes far enough upstream to be upstream of both toenail and artery. Simply blocking the toenail symptom by doing something at the knee would not be enough. Have to go back to root causes.
Which leads to a confusion which I remember from the structured methods for building computer systems which were all the rage in the 80's. There used to be mantra that one should always specify what it was that had to be done, never how it was to be done. I was never very comfortable with this dichotomy, feeling that one person's what was another person's how. And one used to be told off for saying that if one did the what like this, then all these other goodies would become available at no extra charge. Which might have a bearing on whether the project was cost justified. An instance of the serious crime of a project creep. So to go back to where I was, one person's symptom is another person's cause. So I think that one could, in theory anyway, express all these disturbances as a complex directed network and it is, to some extent anyway, a matter of taste which nodes of the network are called causes and which are called symptoms. A confusion related to that when using multiple causes of death to classify deaths. If I die when I happen to have both pneumonia and diabetes, who is to say what the primary cause was? In any event, a much more immediate cause is the electrical power failure in the brain, preceded by the oxygen delivery failure and succeeded by the irreversible breakdown of the flash memory cells. There must be a great big gra(v)y area here.
To sum up in all due form, I am left thinking that the Chinese, the Germans and the French are all right. If you want to express your medicine in terms of toenails, fine. Or livers, fine. Just so long as it works.
Amazing what one gets up to when blowing away the vapours from the night before on a bicycle.
in ancient China it was considered bad form for a lady of any standing to let the doctor see more than a hand, the rest of her being concealed behind a curtain. Partly because of this, Chinese doctors can diagnose all kinds of surprising things from your finger nails. I recall that ridges running up and down the nail are bad, maybe something to do with kidneys. Presumably doctors' wives did not have any standing, by definition, and so they could get with their lives without worrying too much about this particular form;
in present-day France I believe that doctors will try to explain all problems in terms of livers, while in Germany doctors will try to explain all problems in terms of hearts; and,
as noted in a previous posting, the same basic processes make toenails and livers tick.
I get to musing. If one has some kind of a health problem, it is quite possible, likely even, that there has been some disturbance of one of these basic processes. In some organs, the disturbance may not be material. In others, there may be symptoms. Sometimes one has to do something about a symptom. Perhaps because the symptom is pain somewhere or perhaps because the symptom - say the thickening of artery in some important part of the body - might have untoward consequences. It then might be that the disturbance which results in thickening of the artery also results in a recognisable pattern on the toenail of the big toe on the left foot. In which case, sorting out the toenail might also sort out the artery, provided only that the sorting out goes far enough upstream to be upstream of both toenail and artery. Simply blocking the toenail symptom by doing something at the knee would not be enough. Have to go back to root causes.
Which leads to a confusion which I remember from the structured methods for building computer systems which were all the rage in the 80's. There used to be mantra that one should always specify what it was that had to be done, never how it was to be done. I was never very comfortable with this dichotomy, feeling that one person's what was another person's how. And one used to be told off for saying that if one did the what like this, then all these other goodies would become available at no extra charge. Which might have a bearing on whether the project was cost justified. An instance of the serious crime of a project creep. So to go back to where I was, one person's symptom is another person's cause. So I think that one could, in theory anyway, express all these disturbances as a complex directed network and it is, to some extent anyway, a matter of taste which nodes of the network are called causes and which are called symptoms. A confusion related to that when using multiple causes of death to classify deaths. If I die when I happen to have both pneumonia and diabetes, who is to say what the primary cause was? In any event, a much more immediate cause is the electrical power failure in the brain, preceded by the oxygen delivery failure and succeeded by the irreversible breakdown of the flash memory cells. There must be a great big gra(v)y area here.
To sum up in all due form, I am left thinking that the Chinese, the Germans and the French are all right. If you want to express your medicine in terms of toenails, fine. Or livers, fine. Just so long as it works.
Amazing what one gets up to when blowing away the vapours from the night before on a bicycle.
# posted by Jim @ 6:40 AM 
