ABSTRACT
Centuries ago, father of medicine Hippocrates said: It is better to know the man who has the disease than the disease the man has. Of course this is not an either/or proposition, but rather, the fact that both apply. A psychiatrist illustrated this practice scenario with the following statement: If I treated a person with anti-psychotic medication on the assumption that the troubling hallucinations were a symptom of schizophrenia, and he/she subsequently died from complications of a malignant brain tumor, I would never forgive myself for the failure to have made a differential diagnosis before beginning treatment.
