Hello,
Just to add some more confusion to the confusion and because i need a break from my mountain of homework.....one of my professors this morning said a main issue with with medical science is that the medical model is symptom-based.

He said that docs start with the symptoms, and assign treatments based on those. But as the patient progresses, many treatments (ie meds, surgery, diet, etc...depending on the severity of condition) may worsen the condition, or improve it, and lead to the unmasking of other, hidden symptoms ...sometimes alluding to a whole new possible diagnosis.

It reminded me so much of the therapeutic process...how we go in, tell the doc our problems/pain, and it pretty much starts from there and goes "inward."
Then most Ts will 'try on' different diagnoses and treatment plans to see what works and makes us feel better, while continuously upgrading and revising the original problem spectrum, and oftentimes revealing new and hidden causes of pain or etiologies.

So it's like we can't go in and get hooked up to a machine and the T is like, oh, I see you are bipolar with ocd, and this or that therapy/meds will work for you. It's more like, we go in...reveal a fraction of the problem, and the T works with what is given, and we work on it too...but it's this whole evolving process b/c just like we can't SEE what's going on inside our physical bodies all the time (internal organs, for example), we also don't know what unconscious processes we've internalized or what we don't realize we know...if that makes sense.

hope this doesn't sound crazy ha!