Fingerprints of altered states

Altered mental states are expressed by altered language.

Medicine and science are inadequate alone to describe the human internal experience. The tale that goes inside the brain is often at mercy of language. Language at times provides a window into the brain provided the listener comprehends the tonality of his altered language. The true agony of suffering cannot be empathized by a lone gray rectangle of film, the brain scan. The film like language can only gaze over the surface.

“I feel fear” “ i am uneasy” can never describe the psychological turmoil inside. It is on the doctor, the narrator,to weave the tapestry from these ember clues.

A depressed man is a man whose inner self, his emotions are all reduced in dimensionality. How can he describe his suffering when the temporality of pleasure eludes him ?

Philosophers call this internal experience Qualia of self – The redness of red rose that you perceive is truly and personally yours.

The multiple threads of language, technical tools, observations exudate fingerprints that are we use to construct the diagnosis, a narration of the ‘disease’. It is only an assumption for what the patients experiences.

Our journey usually begins with interviewing and examining the patient followed by problem representation.

This is the synthesis phase of problem statement. The context here is essential.

> Coming to a diagnosis is, in a way, casting a physiological horoscope

Diagnosis once given preserves a word,embalms it in its decrepitude, but in a pose which is Nobel, hypocritical and somewhat arbitrary, but with all the authority that a medical degree bestows. Doctors are at times ensnarled by a chain of deductions.

Medical science is a kind of edification which is subject to the limitations our clinical antennae.

Based on the problem statement – differentials are generated. These differentials are then tested. Here the pretest probabilities and red flags rule out the emergency from urgent from important.

But amongst all this weaving , human experience – the quintessential song of life is lost to the void.