Mind vs. Body, and medically related questions

I was recently interviewed for acceptance into medical school and among the usual “why do you want to be a doctor?” and “tell me of an ethical situation…”questions was: “What would you do if you don’t believe what a patient was telling you?” Yikes. No one tells you to prepare for that question.

Anyway, this question made me think of some of the topics introduced briefly in the debate such as addiction, eating disorders, and Munchausen syndrome, as well as the overarching question: should doctors have an authority over patient choice when they may have a mental disorder that causes them to harm themselves? It’s a tough and scary topic – the idea that the mind that is normally geared toward taking care of the body can turn on it and self-destruct. Personally, if I were to ever have any of these mental illnesses, I (as I am now) hope that a doctor would recognized them and gave me that treatment that I needed to get back to my normal (non-disordered) state. However, when one has something like this, how would a health practitioner know for sure?

I would also say that I am a Cartesian, and believe that there is an answer for just about everything out there for us to find. But science is based on patterns, on hypotheses supported or disproved by tons of data that form patterns. In individual cases, patterns in regard to mental illness are hard to find. Is the physician stating that Twinkle’s case is probably caused by Munchausen syndrome wrong to say so since bleeding from uninjured skin is apparently unheard of and Munchausen by Proxy much more common? Shouldn’t a physician keep an open mind: including the consideration of both a physiological anomaly and a mental-disorder-induced self infliction? That seems to be the best scenario for the patient’s health, as it considers all the potential causes of the affliction. And who knows, maybe someday there will be “test” for this mental disorder. But then we’d have to question how we know that to be true and reliable, too, wouldn’t we?