I caught wind of the NYT piece, Epidemic of Diagnosis via Flea’s blog. The article suggests that we’re all suffering from an epidemic of diagnoses, or medicalization.
The phenomenon of medicalization is a complicated derivative of the advancement of medical science. The more we know the more we seek to explain. For example, the exquisite detail now available with imaging technology has uncovered deviations and differences that were never known to exist. Genetic advances have changed how we define one another. Some women with inexplicable infertility we’re once left to believe that to be childless was their fate. Mild forms of cystic fibrosis are now known to explain why some of women can’t bear children.
And no discussion of medicalization in children would be complete without the mention of colic. Perhaps the original diagnosis of infancy, its description has served as the disease of choice in babies with unexplainable irritability. With advances in our understanding of the infant digestive system and the variability of newborn temperament, this description-cum-diagnosis is slowly going the way of leeches and thymus irradiation.
While the NYT piece would have us believe that it was this generation of physicians that invented the cockamamie diagnosis, a review of any 19th century medical textbook proves otherwise. The concept of a diagnosis is one way that we define deviations in our own physiology. And as technology advances we will continue, for better or worse, to define ourselves.