Yes, You Can Catch Insanity
I find it odd that medical treatment insists on being so <i>causal</i>—diagnosing a specific illness, and then treating for that illness, but never, ever treating if you don't have evidence of a particular illness.<p>It makes sense if you're dealing with hypochondriacs or drug-seekers, and it makes epidemiological sense to withhold some treatments from prophylactic use (like antibiotics) to preserve their efficacy. But if you're dealing with an idiopathic illness for over <i>four years</i>, I would think there would come a time where you'd ask the doctor, "can I just try some antibiotics to see what happens? And how about some antiretrovirals, antiparasitics, and antifungals while you're at it?"<p>Just methodically working through the safe, first-line treatments to the major disease classes, taking each for a month or so and seeing what happens, would probably fix 90% of people's chronic illnesses. Even if it didn't, paying attention to people's reactions to being on various medications are some of the best diagnostic tools there are—which second-line treatment regime to pursue would likely become rapidly apparent.<p>But instead, people can go years slowly dying from something that they could fix with a few pills from the corner pharmacy, if a doctor would deign to "tinker" rather than working from theory.