Technology v. the patient

Hillary Johnson, herself an author of a book about an emerging disease (1996) writes in the Foreword to Pamela Weintraub's book, Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic (2008):

"It sometimes seems as if the remarkable technological and scientific advances of the last half century have served to create a medical dead zone in which these contested diseases must languish because the science is still being worked out.... Sir William Osler, a clinician of the early 1900s, revered for his clinical acumen, wrote that studying medicine without patients was like going to sea without charts." (p. xix, xxi)

It is to be hoped that those who seek to qualify the parameters of an illness recognize that patients are not bound by a wish to fit a definition, but a wish to get well.

Johnson, H. (1996). Osler's Web: Inside the Labyrinth of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic. NY: Crown Publishers, Inc.

Weintraub, P. (2008). Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic. NY: St. Martin's Press.