Monday, March 10, 2008

p24 differential diagnosis

Applying Principle Differentially

By John Taylor; 2008 March 10, 09 Ala, 164 BE

We have entered the tougher half of the fast, the iron man stage. Now daylight savings effectively stretches the fast an hour longer, making it difficult to go anywhere in the evening without having meal in the middle; and for the likes of me, March Break keeps the kids home all day, every day, and since I avoid driving at this time, we all get cabin fever together. Sure, I am so close to the line that I probably notice it more than most. Do not get me wrong, so often in past years I had to stop fasting because of migraine attacks and I am grateful for any fasting I can get.

Through these endless afternoons I do things that I cannot mess up, like watching episodes of House, M.D.; now the kids are mildly interested too, so much of the time I plumb my shallow store of medical knowledge explaining what I think is going on. Since most of the mystery illnesses at some point have something to do with ethics, a moral failing, vice or sin of some sort, I am not as lost as I should be. The show provides something to think about without a chance of messing up. I do not look forward to the time soon approaching when I will have gone through the whole series.

The thing I like best about House is its dramatization of the diagnostician's method of differential diagnosis. According to the Wiki article, differential diagnosis took the place of an older, impressionistic technique known as "diagnosis by gestalt." Old-fashioned intuition-based gestalt insights still play a role in differential diagnosis (judging by how often House goes out on a limb based on a hunch), though not perhaps as dramatically as the television series makes out.

After I have watched a spate of episodes -- and the fast is broken -- I always log on and go over the critiques of a real doctor on his blog, at the site mentioned before. One thing that seems to lead to many errors, both real and fictional, is that modern doctors neglect to do what 19th-century hotshot diagnostician William Osler always did, simply look at the patient as they stand erect, preferably naked. Very often he would detect what dozens of other experts missed, just by ogling. Gestalt, I guess.

Anyway, the newer differential diagnosis is, according to Wiki, the,

"process whereby a given condition or circumstance, called the presenting problem or chief complaint, is examined in terms of underlying causal factors and concurrent phenomena as discerned by appropriate disciplinary perspectives and according to several theoretical paradigms or frames of reference, and compared to known categories of pathology or exceptionality."

Because it is done with a group of experts differential diagnosis seems to be nothing more than a systematized, illustrated example of the Socratic method. It reminds me of a study that found that in higher education the lecture method is quite ineffective; students learn and remember far better in an informal, egalitarian, conversational setting.

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Badi' list reader Pat Reid sent out the following teaching suggestion,

"I watch Oprah periodically. At the moment she is having this Monday night Internet discussion on-line with Eckhart Tolle. They are discussing his new book "A New Earth - Awakening to your Life's Purpose". If you miss the on-line (discussion) you can go to www.oprah.com and listen to the podcast or webcast. It is an hour and a half. I am reading the book which is interesting.  What is so appealing to me is that over 750,000 people around the world tuned in the first Monday evening. They are talking about spiritual realities. While I am reading the book I am also looking up quotes from the Baha'i Writings for myself. It relies heavily on Christianity and certainly has the Christians in a stir. He challenges them to awaken to their spiritual reality.

Why I am forwarding this information on to you is that I would like to invite you to listen to the broadcast as it certainly has a lot of people talking and I think this is a great vehicle to introduce the Faith to people who are seeking that awakening.  This Monday they will be doing the second chapter of this book.

Hope this finds everyone well and enjoying the Fast.

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I see Hugh Laurie's character House listing symptoms and trying to match them to a condition, and I see, well, myself as I research and write. That is just what I have been doing for decades as I built up my "system" of quotes. I was a differential diagnostician and did not know it.

Here, let us try it out right now. Take an area that I am otherwise utterly unqualified to comment on, much less analyze: the current economic meltdown in the U.S. economy. Let us just write down two principles on our white board, and see how they fit. First some background by an economist that I have learned to respect, Paul Krugman. Here is what he has to say about the American central bank's possible intervention to slow the banana of mortgages on which the boot of their economy is slipping, in today's New York Times commentary:

"Some observers worry that the Fed is taking over the banks' financial risk. But what worries me more is that the move seems trivial compared with the size of the problem: $200 billion may sound like a lot of money, but when you compare it with the size of the markets that are melting down -- there are $11 trillion in U.S. mortgages outstanding -- its a drop in the bucket." (The Face-Slap Theory, New York Times, March 10, 2008, <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/opinion/10krugman.html?th&emc=th>)

So, Americans have borrowed eleven trillion dollars to pay for inferior, environmentally destructive housing -- based on glorified land speculation -- and this is putting the entire economy in danger. Jesus said not to build your house on sand; he did not consider that one day people would be building on bubbles. Yes, this differential diagnosis is going to be easier than I thought. Let us turn to our first two principles on the white board and see what diagnosis we come up with.

Search for truth

It is a moral obligation to investigate reality first. You have got to suspect that home owners are not after the truth when they knowingly borrow money for sub-standard products. Integrity is the economic expression of truth, as are value for the dollar and thrift. Is there a need to borrow in the first place? Is there a need to own? Clearly greed has permeated the system at every level, and people continue to be dazzled by an economic ideology based on a superficial understanding of freedom. We trample on what is right and laugh all the way to the bank thinking that there will be no reckoning. Instead, we must become seekers of economic reality. The up-side is that if we want to reverse the slide and crash, all we have to do is to reflect, meditate, pray, consult and confidently act for change. This pops the bubble of imitation.

Oneness of humanity.

The earth is our home, and we need to make our homes the best they can be. The life story of Buckminster Fuller demonstrates how corrupt and backward the housing market has been from the beginning. Fuller was devoted to bringing high technology to the home but came up against mortgage and labor buffers. Only with the geodesic dome did he break through, but even today dome homes and other innovations to living space are rare. If he came back today, Fuller would find nothing different, except what is worse. The average family still borrows huge sums to buy sub-standard, inefficient housing, and that addiction is threatening the largest economy on the planet with imminent collapse.

The diagnosis of Baha'u'llah is simple and clear: we fail to realize how high the human station is. That is why so many blindly accept that greed is all we can expect of one another, and why we despair of planning for a better future.

"Great is the station of man. Great must also be his endeavors for the rehabilitation of the world and the well-being of nations. I beseech the One true God to graciously confirm thee in that which beseemeth man's station." (Tablets, Maqsud, 174)

If we accept that there is one human race, what we must do follows right from that. We must accept one currency for the whole planet, run by a democratic central bank. A single housing standard, integrated with transport, would put us on a rock foundation. From that would come the right to travel and live in any sustainable place on the planet as if it were our own homeland, which it is. We must see our planet as one, not many. Dividing money up into many currencies and letting them be traded freely opens up speculation on monetary exchange rates. The so-called Tobin Tax on all markets would slow speculation while providing a flow of funds into the coffers of the United Nations. Nothing less than this radical therapy will cure the ailing economic life of humanity.

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