Article ID: CBB249581784

Uncertainty and the inconvenient facts of diagnosis (2021)

unapi

One common contemporary usage of the term “diagnostic uncertainty” is to refer to cases for which a diagnosis is not, or cannot, be applied to the presenting case. This is a paradoxical usage, as the absence of diagnosis is often as close to a certainty as can be a human judgement. What makes this sociologically interesting is that it represents an “epistemic defence,” or a means of accounting for a failure of medicine’s explanatory system. This system is based on diagnosis, or the classification of individual complaints into recognizable diagnostic categories. Diagnosis is pivotal to medicine’s epistemic setting, for it purports to explain illness via diagnosis, and yet is not always able to do so. This essay reviews this paradoxical use, and juxtaposes it to historical explanations for non-diagnosable illnesses. It demonstrates how representing non-diagnosis as uncertainty protects the epistemic setting by positioning the failure to locate a diagnosis in the individual, rather than in the medical paradigm.

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Authors & Contributors
Cooper, Rachel
Maung, Hane Htut
Priani, Egidio
Aragona, Massimiliano
Berg, Hein van den
Berrios, German E.
Journals
History of Psychiatry
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences
História, Ciências, Saúde---Manguinhos
Revue d'Histoire des Sciences
Social Studies of Science
Publishers
L'Erma di Bretschneider
Oxford University Press
State University of New York at Binghamton
Éditions Hermann
Concepts
Nosology; classification of diseases
Philosophy of medicine
Mental disorders and diseases
Psychiatry
Diagnosis
Disease and diseases
People
Canguilhem, Georges
Janet, Pierre
Andresen, Christopher Schroeder
Time Periods
19th century
21st century
18th century
20th century
20th century, early
20th century, late
Places
Brazil
Venice (Italy)
Denmark
France
Italy
United Kingdom
Institutions
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)
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