There are times when the diagnosis announces itself as the patient walks in, because the body is, among other things, a text. I'm thinking of the icy hand, coarse dry skin, hoarse voice, puffy face, sluggish demeanor and hourglass swelling in the neck — signs of a thyroid that's running out of gas. This afternoon the person before me in my office isn't a patient but a young physician; still, the clinical gaze doesn't turn off, and I diagnose existential despair.
Let's not call this intuition — an unfashionable term in our algorithmic world, although there is more to intuition than you think (or less than you think), because it is a subconscious application of a heuristic that can be surprisingly accurate. This physician, whose gender I withhold in the interest of anonymity and because the disease is gender-neutral, is burned out in what should be the honeymoon of a career. Over the years, I have come to recognize discrete passages in a medical life, not unlike in Shakespeare's "Seven Ages of Man" — we have our med-school equivalent of "the whining schoolboy with his satchel and shining morning face" and the associate professor "jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel." But what I see in my colleague is disillusionment, and it has come too early, and I am seeing too much of it.
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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/magazine/health-issue-what-we-lose-with-data-driven-medicine.html?
