In contemporary medical practice and in the public mind, there exists a kind of "looseness" in the correspondence between correct diagnosis and effective treatment of a diagnosed condition. A patient may hold the diagnosis of their condition to be correct even in the absence of success in treating it. Often, people confuse diagnosing -- giving a name to a malady -- (such as "arthritis," "bursitis," "fibromyalgia," "tendinitis," "plantar fascitis," "migraine headache," "ligamentous strain," "back trouble" -- name yours), with understanding it correctly. But describing something is not the same as understanding it.

Due to this "looseness" in the minds of the public and medical profession, alike, a diagnosis may be accepted even when treatment is not so effective or symptoms reappear. (Drug side-effects are also a sign of such incomplete understanding.) This state of affairs often pertains to chronic medical complaints.

A correction of understanding is needed: Diagnosis and treatment go together -- not just because one follows the other, but because the success of treatment points to how well the malady is understood. If a malady has been correctly diagnosed and is understood correctly, a course of treatment based upon that understanding will begin to provide the desired relief immediately. That's true of other areas of life; why not medicine? If the method of treatment is not so successful, the understanding of the malady is shown to be at best incomplete, and other, better options may hopefully exist.

Unfortunately, too often the treatment applied to a given malady (particularly to a chronic condition) fails to provide relief and people accept this state of affairs. Instead of questioning the diagnosis or the treatment, people often accept the idea that the malady is just "difficult to treat." They accept slow progress.

It is unfortunate, but people seem to assume that medical matters are inevitably beyond their understanding; even more bizarrely, people sometimes assume that if something seems too easy to understand, it must be wrong or not at the level of "professional understanding."

This acceptance of obscurity is compounded by the tendency of science and medicine to emphasize minutia - enzymes, hormones, chemistry, cellular types and behavior, etc., and the complexity of their interactions. These minutia are the "trees" that, when made the primary object of study, distract one from seeing the "forest", the grand pattern that simplifies the entire view. Minutia overwhelm the mind, hard to understand. Thus, medical practitioners accept complicated obscurity in their own profession, based upon the commonly accepted practice of science, which is to study minutia. It's sometimes a useful approach, but sometimes it's the wrong approach.

The telling question is, "does the treatment work?"

Conventional medicine is sometimes unable to treat certain kinds of conditions, and people are reluctant or unaccustomed to recognize that inability - regardless of the lack of success of treatment.

To recognize the inability of their current practitioner to deal with certain conditions would instantly liberate people to pursue remedies outside of conventional medicine, and does, for many. Unfortunately, the tendency to proceed without understanding leaves people prey to quackery and skeptical of understandable, elegant solutions to their problems. Add to this the fear compounded by suffering, and people's reluctance to go another direction is understandable.

Clarity comes with a return to this simple observation: if the diagnosis is correct and correctly understood, the treatment selected is correct, and if the treatment is correct, relief follows. If not, something is incorrect. Getting this viewpoint is, for some, a leap into understanding.

So, my final words to you are, "If you haven't gotten satisfactory relief from treatment, either the diagnosis or the treatment is incorrect. Seek another understanding of the situation and approach it from another direction."