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Alright, this may be a naive question but I was just pondering it.
My reason for thinking about this is that I am interested in the future of psychiatry.
The scope of psychiatry, from what I have read using the search function here on SDN, seems to be within behavioral problems. However, mental ******ation, dementia, and alzheimer's are types of behavioral problems too and yet it normally falls under the scope of a neurologist, according to the following graph:
What this makes me think, then, is that psychiatry is a field who's scope is those conditions that have so far only simple biological understanding at the cellular/molecular level. For instance, we cannot really say what exactly causes schizophrenia, including the combination of genes, environmental factors, nor exactly what is happening at the biological, physiological level in detail. We can say some associated genes or that certain medications work, but we cannot really determine the exact cause.
Now I know, you're probably saying this isn't 100% accurate. Maybe not even 75% accurate, but this is just a naive assumption I have came to.
Having said this, I now wonder what will happen to psychiatry if we have a major breakthrough in the understanding of conditions such as schizophrenia, PTSD, bipolar disorder, etc. etc. such that one can determine the exact biological causes and the therapy to best treat these conditions. Yes, I know, these conditions may never be curable, only managed. But one would be obtuse to not consider the possibility that in our lifetimes we may have scientific breakthroughs that lead to a much deeper biological, if not complex genetic/epigenomic, understanding of these conditions
If we did move to such a greater understanding of these conditions, would the scope of healing these patients more pertain to a neurologist given the circumstances?
tl;dr
If we come to understand the root biological causes and exact genes (I know they are largely multifactorial and complex, but with computing and technology we can probably do amazing things in the future) of conditions under the scope of psychiatry right now, will those conditions become to be under the scope of neurology instead?
My reason for thinking about this is that I am interested in the future of psychiatry.
The scope of psychiatry, from what I have read using the search function here on SDN, seems to be within behavioral problems. However, mental ******ation, dementia, and alzheimer's are types of behavioral problems too and yet it normally falls under the scope of a neurologist, according to the following graph:
What this makes me think, then, is that psychiatry is a field who's scope is those conditions that have so far only simple biological understanding at the cellular/molecular level. For instance, we cannot really say what exactly causes schizophrenia, including the combination of genes, environmental factors, nor exactly what is happening at the biological, physiological level in detail. We can say some associated genes or that certain medications work, but we cannot really determine the exact cause.
Now I know, you're probably saying this isn't 100% accurate. Maybe not even 75% accurate, but this is just a naive assumption I have came to.
Having said this, I now wonder what will happen to psychiatry if we have a major breakthrough in the understanding of conditions such as schizophrenia, PTSD, bipolar disorder, etc. etc. such that one can determine the exact biological causes and the therapy to best treat these conditions. Yes, I know, these conditions may never be curable, only managed. But one would be obtuse to not consider the possibility that in our lifetimes we may have scientific breakthroughs that lead to a much deeper biological, if not complex genetic/epigenomic, understanding of these conditions
If we did move to such a greater understanding of these conditions, would the scope of healing these patients more pertain to a neurologist given the circumstances?
tl;dr
If we come to understand the root biological causes and exact genes (I know they are largely multifactorial and complex, but with computing and technology we can probably do amazing things in the future) of conditions under the scope of psychiatry right now, will those conditions become to be under the scope of neurology instead?