Rare disease and the most vulnerable population: how can NLP help?
Linguamatics
Zebras -vs- Horses
Watching the development of a newborn unfold is both exciting and terrifying. As a physician and now parent of a newborn, I can say with certainty that the logical side of me struggles when diagnosing my own child. My baby wasn’t even a day old when I was already convinced that she might have Hirschsprung Disease. Later I learned the nurse had changed her diaper (during my brief nap or rather, collapse, due to pure exhaustion) and forgot to mention her intestines are indeed doing their job. As you progress you learn, as in medical school, to assume the more common problems and be aware of when you should go down the less common diagnosis route. A blocked tear duct in babies can look scary but is relatively common (1 in 25) and often clears by non-invasive methods; babies really do cry relentlessly sometimes and this is completely ‘normal’ - you learn to realize when it’s simply just the trials and tribulations of a growing child- and when it’s not. In medicine this is referred to as the Zebras -vs- Horses Phenomenon - aka look for the most common diagnosis not the most rare first.