An Autism Recovery

Authority Or Teacher?

A good friend of ours recently asked me about all this lab test stuff I was writing about:

How much participation with a physician are you using in these series of tests? I’m not judging you especially considering these tests don’t involve heavy, expensive machinery. In fact, I’m applauding you in that you and Corinne are doing a lot of work in such detail and precision that I wouldn’t expect from a doctor who has the workload of several patients. It’s also a testament to the Information Age that the information you’re gathering is so readily available.

My Response

No participation so far other than books on the biomedical treatment of autism. My plan is to develop what I want the sequence to be and what tests should be run first, etc. as if I were the expert. Then when we meet with the doctors we’ll have a conversation about what they would do differently.

I’m okay if their recommendations are different. What I’m looking for them is to say “here’s how I would do this differently and why” and not “I’m the doctor here, so trust me when I tell you to do this sequence instead.”

If I walk in without having done some thinking about this, I won’t feel like I’m in a good position to evaluate the quality of advice I’m getting from the doctor and that lack of quality evaluation might lead to wasted time, fruitless paths, and wrong turns.

It’s a way to ensure a base level of quality in the doctor’s medicine, and, just as important, the quality of the doctor’s attitude toward us: authoritarian or teacher.

Integrative Chess

The systems of the body work together in ways that are poorly understood. We study individual systems on their own to reduce the complexity of the overall system of the body. And you can keep reducing the systems to ever-smaller subsystems and still find plenty of complexity to be interesting. The deep complexity makes it necessary to take this approach.

You learn to play chess by being able to identify the pieces and how they move and the rules of their interaction. That’s a rook and it moves only in straight lines. Oh, but it can’t move beyond a space another piece already occupies. And you can’t move it if it would place your king in check.

And then at some point you learn some tactics. A few pieces working together. Don’t just trade pieces without a plan.

And then you learn strategy. In the middle game, you want to move to control an open File before your opponent. If it’s a closed game, you want to trade your Bishop for your opponent’s Knight. And so on. This is integration of the systems and it’s possible in chess because the subsystems are so simple.

In the body, the subsystems are so complex that it can be challenging to integrate it all back into a conceptual whole. I was pleased to stumble across an article on Systems Biology, a field of study seeking to understand the interactions between systems more than the systems themselves.

This approach feels somewhat natural to me because of my software background, where a big part of the work is abstracting up, breaking things down to working components, and then re-abstracting back up incorporating what you learned about the limitations of your earlier abstractions.

In the end, you have a very comfortable familiarity with the real-world processes and objects that your software system models. What I’m hoping for is that through Systems Biology we end up with more doctors with that same comfortable familiarity with the systems of the body. There are too few today in a noble profession.