The challenge of exploring organ function: knowledge is not care, but care needs knowledge!

Excerpt

The medical strategies of various diseases are not a straightforward process but are rather the result of complex development. These strategies are generally described as a back-and-forth approach between the basic knowledge of disease pathophysiology and observations of symptoms. Results of clinical investigations or monitoring tools are often surrogates of collection of symptom, and therefore, this approach is renewed when an innovative tool becomes available. The respective role of each component, i.e., the basic knowledge, the new technique, and the clinical approach, varies according to the pathology or organ involved in the considered illness, but the rationale stays the same. However, this simplified pattern of medical approach does not fully describe the actual way of medical thinking. Indeed, this later is made more complex as the path of thinking from basic knowledge to symptom is not the same that the one required to discover the cause of a symptom. In other words, the pathways of the mind from basic knowledge to symptom and its reverse are not the same. In the present issue, the review article from Dr Sakka is an interesting opportunity to illustrate this huge difficulty [1]. …