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Um, we actually have. Remember the episode on the airplane? The reason Cuddy vomited, and showed other symptoms, was that she believed there was an actual illness.
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posted
On the other hand, there are several examples of the CDC investigating and dismissing outbreaks of new illness as mass hysteria, then a week later the investigator came down with mass hysteria himself and decided it was real after all. If I'm not mistaken, Legionnaire's Disease was one of those cases.
Our faith certainly has a huge effect on our lives, there's no question of that. But I don't think it's helpful for doctors to lie to their patients, or to become inclined to dismiss their patients' concerns as psychologically generated.
There has to be some two-way trust between doctors and patients for the relationship to work. If doctors routinely lied, and patients' symptoms were routinely dismissed, we might as well not have doctors at all. I've found that the doctors who can help most are those who treat their patients as colleagues, not as lesser beings incapable of understanding medicine and deluded as to what symptoms they're experiencing.
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