"And indeed if there’s only one viable treatment for the patients symptoms, why test at all?"
I'm not sure if this would usually be the case. You can have flu-like symptoms from just the flu, Covid-19 or even HIV. A diagnosis would help to sort patients that need to rest at home and those that need to rush to the emergency..
I wonder if the complexity/cost of getting sequencing based diagnosis for infectious disease even today is the actual problem? Is sequencing based diagnosis trivial in terms of effort and cost, but isn't being taken up for the quoted reason? Or is it too troublesome and expensive so doctors just prefer to skip it?
In that case there are multiple therapies available depending on the diagnostic output.
I think I’m likely over stating the case somewhat.
But I suspect some clinicians will start treatment for the condition they believe is most likely before they have test results. For example like the case I previously wrote about:
"And indeed if there’s only one viable treatment for the patients symptoms, why test at all?"
I'm not sure if this would usually be the case. You can have flu-like symptoms from just the flu, Covid-19 or even HIV. A diagnosis would help to sort patients that need to rest at home and those that need to rush to the emergency..
I wonder if the complexity/cost of getting sequencing based diagnosis for infectious disease even today is the actual problem? Is sequencing based diagnosis trivial in terms of effort and cost, but isn't being taken up for the quoted reason? Or is it too troublesome and expensive so doctors just prefer to skip it?
In that case there are multiple therapies available depending on the diagnostic output.
I think I’m likely over stating the case somewhat.
But I suspect some clinicians will start treatment for the condition they believe is most likely before they have test results. For example like the case I previously wrote about:
https://aseq.substack.com/p/malaria-in-maryland
In general trying things and seeing if they work seems like common practice.