Some diagnoses are descriptions of symptoms, with no indication of the cause. If your diagnosis is idiopathic (cause unknown), what use is it? I’ve been struggling to articulate my ideas around these limitations and I thought of a simple analogy.

You come home at night and it’s dark in the house (diagnosis). But why is it dark? You flip the light switch and nothing happens. You check the circuit breaker and all is good. You change out the bulb and suddenly you have lights. The diagnosis was useful because you looked for a solution. If you resigned yourself to stumbling around in the dark instead, what’s the point of the diagnosis?

I believe many diagnoses are helpful as they lead you to corrective action. If no corrective action is possible, it can still be helpful for other people to understand and have empathy for your plight. If a diagnosis does neither of these things, it might be a useless idea caused by our need to label everything. Even worse, it can be a rationale for accepting things that we can actually change.

If you have a diagnosis, are you using it to find a solution?