Meta-diagnosis: towards a hermeneutical perspective in medicine with an emphasis on alcoholism.
This essay argues that making a diagnosis in medicine is essentially a hermeneutic enterprise, one in which interpretation skills play a major part in understanding a disease. The clinical encounter is an event comprised of two 'voices'; one is the voice of science which is grounded in empiricism, the other is that of human experience, which is grounded in story-telling and the interpretation of those stories. Using two 'voices', one from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-III-Revised, which describes 'alcohol abuse' and 'alcohol dependence', and the other, that of Claire, a character in Edward Albee's play, A Delicate Balance, who is conversing with her brother-in-law, Tobias, I apply principles from Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics to the clinical diagnostic process. The essay will demonstrate that we overlook an enormous amount of information about alcoholism by an over-reliance on 'objective data' and that our hope for understanding alcoholics is in listening to their voices, and sharing the interpretation of their experiences with them.
Bowman
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CA
DePaul University, School for New Learning, Chicago, IL 60604-2302.
D000437:Alcoholism / Q000175:diagnosis*; D006801:Humans; D008513:Medicine in Literature; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis