Why I Look at the Place Rather Than the Number

Why I Look at the Place Rather Than the Number

There is pain you can put a single finger on, and pain you have to rub over with the flat of your hand.

So I often ask: "Could you point to where it is?" Many people find it hard. They rub broadly with a palm and say it is around here. That is an answer too. Pain that can be pointed to and pain that cannot are different stories.

The reason I ask is simple. The number is on paper, and the body is here.

A blood draw takes flowing blood. It takes what has been mixed once across the whole body and gathers it into a single figure. It has to be built that way to be comparable. But what happens in the body differs from place to place. Stored iron falls first and the blood value comes down later. Oxygen is measured in one place and used in another. Bone does not age as one piece. Vessels do not narrow just anywhere.

So when a single gathered number is normal, that does not mean every part of the body is normal. An average does not know the place.

If I reduce everything said so far to one line, it is this. Many tests measure one item at a time, look at a still frame, look at one moment, look under standard conditions, look at items separately, and gather the result into a single number. They are accurate because they are built that way.

The body is uncomfortable where it runs against those six. Several things tilt the same way together, they go out of step while moving, they accumulate time, they ride the situation, they show themselves in between, and they differ from place to place.

If the tests are normal and you are in pain, the body is not strange and the test is not wrong. The two are looking at different things.

My work is to read what lies between them.