Misdiagnosis Theory – Overview
Medical truth is a category of truth that deserves to be respected. There is an aspect of human nature, or at least human nature as it has been expressed in our present culture, that makes metaphors linking medical and moral truth almost too easy. But that should not excuse the negligence involved in equating medical and moral truth, much less allowing one to supersede or subsume the other. Medical truth is a variety of truth that requires medical evidence. For a biochemical disease to be considered properly diagnosed, biochemical evidence must be properly gathered, presented and understood. The use of charismatic, institutional, or authoritative power to convince anyone of the presence of a lifelong biochemical disease within themselves where none exists or where no biological evidence for such a disease exists amounts to an extreme ethical, epistemic, and medical hazard.
In accepting these truths, we are inclined to feel feelings of relief, spaciousness, and freedom of understandable origins.
Because medical science is still imperfect as it seeks greater perfection, and because our bodies, minds, and senses are inherently interdependent, we can accept small degrees of overlap or interstitial spaces between medical and emotional truths as well as reasonable medical uncertainty. But in growing respect for medical truth as medical truth, as being borne from shared, conceivable and rigorous science, and as having understandable explanations, we derive feelings of safety in our own bodies as bodies, and their relationship to those with knowledge and power around us, and their relationship to our state.
Knowledge of how to navigate and exercise power within a corrupt medical system is not real medical knowledge.
If something feels fishy about a proposed medical diagnosis, procedure, or treatment, I can question it, including the overarching contexts.
Thoughts are thoughts, not symptoms — and certainly not in cases where medical compliance is being coerced. They may arise and exist in concert with instincts or biochemical states, but they also can have their own reality separate from these such that I can consider them and relate them to the thoughts of others without the intrusion of a medical experts. In the 1800s Comte de Mach, the founder of positivism, wrote: “The object of all true Philosophy is to frame a system which shall comprehend human life under every aspect, social as well as individual. It embraces, therefore, the three kinds of phenomena of which our life consists, Thoughts, Feelings, and Actions.” Without logical and positivist thinking, the kinds of positive results that modern medicine enjoys would not have come into existence. And the life of the mind in the culture of a misdiagnosed person is something a misdiagnosed person can and should contribute to.
Respecting medical truth should never have to include respecting medical ideas that are removed from it or medical professionals who don’t.
Explore the opposite: Tenet 3 – Medical truth supersedes and subsumes moral truth and is inherently flexible
Misdiagnosed Anonymous 