“It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has”
Hippocrates ~500 BC
It’s cheesy, to put a quote that allegedly dates back to Hippocrates on the top of the page, when designing a website as a medical doctor. I guess I am cheesy. But I didn’t pick the quote randomly – I chose it because I truly believe it captures something: the fact that disease presents itself differently depending on the person in question.
Human life, death and disease is so very complex. It brings up everything from preconceptions and ideas, fears, wishes and spiritual beliefs to personal history, education, logic and rational thinking. Somewhere, in the middle of this, the actual lived experience of the individual is formed. Sometimes there is contrast between the actual life a patient lives and the life the patient wishes he or she would’ve lived; a contrast which causes great suffering suffering and unhealth. One of my professors once said that it isn’t disease that brings the patient to the doctor. It’s suffering. I don’t think my most important job is to find disease. It’s to find the suffering person and guide them towards a better understanding of themselves, their disease and the way forward.
Early on in my medical career, as a matter of fact during my time as a student, I was intrigued by the concept of chronic pain and the profound suffering I saw in patients with chronic pain conditions. This interest led me to the field of pain rehabilitation after my graduation in January 2020. At the rehabilitation clinic, I had the great pleasure to work with highly skilled and experienced professionals in a multidisciplinary team. They could not only guide me on my first steps as a working professional but also ignite a fierce interest in the understanding of the whole individual, not only a specific part of them. It gave me a direction, pain medicine, and clarity: the system we have built is made for patients with an emergency, not for those with chronic conditions. I want to be part of a change into a system where chronic conditions are the rule, not the exception, and where it’s easy to be guided to the right discipline and get the help one needs in a reasonable time frame.