Medical Vocabulary // sample text Self-treatment is dangerous and characterizes illiterate, backward people. == Everyone has been sick and gets sick from time to time. I believe that the above claim touches upon a serous problem: whether to trust doctors or at least to what extent trust, or what kind of constraints to apply to a particular verdict or judgment? Based on my experience I will try to show that this is not as obvious as it may seem at first sight. First of all, do you trust your physician? During my life I've gained experience with many different MDs in different countries with regards to different injuries or illnesses. I have no diseases and no experience in these cases. All what I say is about wounds and sicknesses. I love sport and of course as everyone involved in any contact sport I've had a number of injuries. Starting from just a sprained ankle, knee or elbow through a broken leg, arm or nose ending on a cut finger or leg. Some of these even more times. My first and foremost observation is that the medical verdict is very sensitive on indescribable nuances such as whether a particular pain is strong, very strong or not. There is no clear scale how to measure different kind of pains. It is not an easy task to describe what do we exactly feel, a burning pain, dull pain, excruciating pain or gnawing pain. There is a fine line between these terms. In a result the expected error on the verdict may be huge. Once two verdicts from two different doctors, given the same description, varied from a week-two break from sport activities to 6 weeks with a plaster cast on my leg. All this makes me suspicious of quality of MDs. My next thoughts concern about illnesses. I have to say that I am very rarely sick but this winter was particularly bad. There are some terrible bugs going around here. I struggled with some viruses and other things for a quite some time. As I travel a lot I do not have one family doctor and thus I can compare different approaches used by doctors. Namely: the first approach assumes to not use any medications at all. Your body has to fight against dangerous bacterias and co without any support. To such an extent that a terrible cough can last up to 12 weeks (sic!). The second approach obviously makes use of all sorts of syrups, tablets and so on. All in all, it may be concluded that we should take things in our hands. I always try to go to a doctor but then I try to find the right balance. And there we are near the so-called self-treatment...