“The longer you’re in a field, the harder it is to perceive new truths. Your mind is biased toward refining what you’re already doing instead of exploring fresh terrain.” James Clear
The causes of chronic disease can seldom be found in one specialty alone: Discovery requires a new paradigm for understanding and diagnosing infectious causes of chronic disease. Chronic disease is a long and evolving process, which can create new symptoms and findings during that evolving process, leading a patient to seek care at multiple specialties and to develop “co-morbid” conditions. A chronic disease may be assigned different names as the symptoms evolve, based on the specialty caring for the patient and/or as a description of the symptoms at that point in time.
It is possible and necessary at times to gain new insight from an outside perspective, i.e. another medical specialty or outside of medicine. “Watershed moments occasionally come along in medical history when previously intractable or even deadly conditions suddenly become treatable or preventable. They are sometimes accompanied by a shift in how scientists understand the disorders in question.”