Posted by alexandra_k on October 10, 2006, at 23:30:48
In reply to Re: experts say...ditch schizophrenia label » xbunny, posted by SLS on October 10, 2006, at 23:07:09
> I believe these are discrete diagnosable entities; the individual cases within which have similar characteristics and respond similarly to similar treatments.
In virtue of sharing the same symptoms?
It might be that symptom plus etiology of the symptom is the basic unit of psychopathology.
Kind of like the little lego building blocks of psychopathology and different people have different combinations of blocks...
Medications might be targeted to the blocks (symptoms)
So people take a combination of meds that is taylored to their individual blocks.
Of course it might turn out that some combinations of blocks are always found together... And further research might tell us why that is so... But we need to find correlations first...> Although to the credit of the establishment, the identification of the various subtypes makes for a recognition of different illnesses.
Trouble is... There can be about as much variation between patients of the same subtype as there is between patients with different diagnoses... The sub-types don't seem to be natural kinds either...
But then the same problem emerges on the symptom level... Thats why people are starting to talk about symptoms plus etiology.
(So delusions caused by cerebral trauma might be different to delusions associated with psychosis, for example).
The idea would be to do some statistical magic with looking at particular symptoms (and severity) and the effects of medications and therapies and the like... Trouble with the current scheme of things is that patients are studied in virtue of their diagnostic category instead of their symptoms. So... There isn't all that much data on symptoms and symptoms that are correlated and on the effects of meds on particular symptoms or symptom combinations or therapy on particular symptoms or symptom combinations. Instead... People insist on trying to find what all people with schizophrenia or a parituclar subtype of schizophrenia have in common when we have known for a while now that they simply don't have anything interesting in common.
Like trying to do chemistry with the kind 'yellow metal'
poster:alexandra_k
thread:693568
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20061003/msgs/693736.html