Inpatient Infectious Disease: Ambiguity Is Often The Rule Of The Day
Ambiguity. Medicine, like art, is filled with ambiguity, at least the way I practice it. Most of my practice is in the hospital. I am sometimes called to see patients that other physicians cannot figure out. And that puts me at a disadvantage, because the doctors who were referring patients to me are all bright, excellent doctors. Often the question is ‘Why does the patient have a fever?’ or ‘Why is the patient ill?’ Sometimes I have an answer. Most of the time I do not.
I am happy, however, to be able to tell the patient what they don’t have. I can often inform the patient and their family that whatever they have is probably not life-threatening or life-damaging, just life-inconveniencing, and most acute illnesses go away with no diagnosis. I always put the ‘just’ in air quotes, because illnesses that require hospitalization are rarely ‘just.’ Just without quotes is reserved for the antivaccine crowd and applied to the small number of deaths from vaccine preventable diseases in unvaccinated children. John Donne they ain’t.
We are excellent, I tell them, at diagnosing life-threatening problems that we can treat, and terrible at diagnosing processes that are self-limited. Of course diagnostic testing is always variable. No test is 100% in making a diagnosis, and often with infections I cannot grow the organism that I suspect is causing the patient’s disease. So for hospitalized patients, ambiguity and uncertainty are the rule of the day. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
