Advantages Of Retrospective Diagnosis

Retrospective diagnosis is examining the evidence/archives from ancient medicine or any other era and comparing that data to today’s era of medicine, or it can be to diagnose a patient from the past with today’s knowledge by using the documents and/or artifacts that may be relevant or pertain to the patient. Therefore, this paper is going to examine how retrospective diagnosis works, examples of retrospective diagnosis, it’s strengths and weaknesses, and why retrospective diagnosis is important and worthwhile. Furthermore retrospective diagnosis goes through a process by examining a piece of evidence from the past, trying to comprehend the meaning of it, and then concluding what the present day diagnosis would be. In greater detail of this …show more content…
First, retrospective diagnosis is able to give people of today an idea of what the people of that time were diagnosed with. Therefore, people today are able to have a better grasp of what life was like during that time. Also, retrospective diagnosis may possibly come up with more logical explanations of what the patient was experiencing, this may be due to the different factors that the Greeks may not have valued as much. For example, a doctor today may link the diagnosis with a cause based on the person’s environment, but some (not all) Greek doctors may contribute the cause to magical or supernatural …show more content…
First, it involves assumptions of the three concepts stated earlier, semantic context, medical thinking, and biological constants. Semantic context and vocabulary are not exact, because modern medical terms don’t perfectly correlate with ancient medical terms, and even though some biological constants may stay the same from 2000 years ago, some bacteria and viruses have mutated. Plus, reading historical documents is not exactly a precise practice. There can be arguments over what the medical thinking was or the semantic context. Furthermore, there’s differences between ancient thinking and modern thinking, and additionally there is differences in what ancient medicine and modern medicine focus on. For example, in the book Prognosis the author states that when the physician visits the patient he should see the patient lying on his side, with his limbs slightly bent. If the patient is not lying like so, and is lying on his back or stomach, the physician should take this as a bad sign. (Hippocratic Writings, 171). However in the modern day how a patient lies may not be taken into account with as much value as it previously did during the times of ancient medicine. Consequently, disease can be caught up in one’s own system of medical thought. This means that medical thinking has changed over