Between Diagnosis and Belief: What Medicine Might Be Missing
- jeanne7629
- Jul 28
- 1 min read
Updated: Aug 4
I’m sharing a newsletter I really enjoyed called The Checkup, which rounds up health news for the MIT Technology Review. This edition explored the role of hope in healthcare, and how deeply intertwined our mental and physical states can be. I found the idea of designing tools and strategies to help people lead more hopeful lives compelling, especially in a system that often focuses more on diagnosis than on the emotional experience of being unwell.
It also led me to read one of the linked articles on placebo surgeries, which I found fascinating in an entirely different way. The idea that some surgical procedures may have no effect beyond the placebo response raises all kinds of ethical and practical questions. I’m not sure how I’d feel about undergoing one myself, but it certainly made me reflect on how much of medicine is about perception and belief (whether we realise it or not)!
What stayed with me most from The Checkup though, was the tension it captured between doctors needing to be transparent and pragmatic, and the very human need for hope. The question posed: Should doctors prescribe hope? may not have a simple answer. But it left me thinking that even if hope isn’t something that can be prescribed, it’s still something worth consciously cultivatindg.
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