As a physician, who has been in practice for over 20 years, my main role is to help patients discover what is wrong with them. Patients usually come to me with a set of symptoms and complaints. I synthesize this information along with diagnostic testing in the form of blood tests, imaging and various other tests and come up with a diagnosis.

The word diagnosis means the art of identifying a disease from its signs and symptoms. Modern medicine relies on diagnoses to prescribe a plan of treatment, which, often, involves pharmaceutical medications.

However, should we be labeling patients with diagnoses? The reason to question this is the psychological impact of diagnoses. There have been several studies looking at this exact theme.

One study was a meta-analysis which looked at the nature and prevalence of clinically significant psychological distress related symptoms in the wake of a breast cancer diagnosis.1 In this study, 39% of these patients suffered distress, 34% suffered anxiety, 31% suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and 20% suffered from depression.

Another study looked at the emotional and psychological impact of a heart failure diagnosis, through questionnaires, and found that these patients scored in the moderate range on measures of anxiety and depression.2 Even a........

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