full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Jennifer Brea: What happens when you have a disease doctors can't diagnose


Unscramble the Blue Letters


Why has this idea had such staying power? I do think it has to do with sexism, but I also think that fundamentally, doctors want to help. They want to know the answer, and this category allows doctors to traet what would otherwise be unrabattele, to explain illnesses that have no explanation. The problem is that this can cause real harm. In the 1950s, a psychiatrist named eoilt Slater studied a cohort of 85 patients who had been diagnosed with hysteria. Nine years later, 12 of them were dead and 30 had become disabled. Many had undiagnosed ciontonids like mtluiple sclerosis, eplpisey, brain tumors. In 1980, hrtiyesa was officially renamed "conversion dsrioedr." When my neurologist gave me that diagnosis in 2012, he was echoing Freud's words verbatim, and even today, women are 2 to 10 times more likely to receive that diagnosis.

Open Cloze


Why has this idea had such staying power? I do think it has to do with sexism, but I also think that fundamentally, doctors want to help. They want to know the answer, and this category allows doctors to _____ what would otherwise be ___________, to explain illnesses that have no explanation. The problem is that this can cause real harm. In the 1950s, a psychiatrist named _____ Slater studied a cohort of 85 patients who had been diagnosed with hysteria. Nine years later, 12 of them were dead and 30 had become disabled. Many had undiagnosed __________ like ________ sclerosis, ________, brain tumors. In 1980, ________ was officially renamed "conversion ________." When my neurologist gave me that diagnosis in 2012, he was echoing Freud's words verbatim, and even today, women are 2 to 10 times more likely to receive that diagnosis.

Solution


  1. hysteria
  2. multiple
  3. disorder
  4. epilepsy
  5. conditions
  6. treat
  7. untreatable
  8. eliot

Original Text


Why has this idea had such staying power? I do think it has to do with sexism, but I also think that fundamentally, doctors want to help. They want to know the answer, and this category allows doctors to treat what would otherwise be untreatable, to explain illnesses that have no explanation. The problem is that this can cause real harm. In the 1950s, a psychiatrist named Eliot Slater studied a cohort of 85 patients who had been diagnosed with hysteria. Nine years later, 12 of them were dead and 30 had become disabled. Many had undiagnosed conditions like multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, brain tumors. In 1980, hysteria was officially renamed "conversion disorder." When my neurologist gave me that diagnosis in 2012, he was echoing Freud's words verbatim, and even today, women are 2 to 10 times more likely to receive that diagnosis.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
million people 2
multiple sclerosis 2
physical symptoms 2
disproportionately affect 2
autoimmune disease 2



Important Words


  1. answer
  2. brain
  3. category
  4. cohort
  5. conditions
  6. dead
  7. diagnosed
  8. diagnosis
  9. disabled
  10. disorder
  11. doctors
  12. echoing
  13. eliot
  14. epilepsy
  15. explain
  16. explanation
  17. fundamentally
  18. gave
  19. harm
  20. hysteria
  21. idea
  22. illnesses
  23. multiple
  24. named
  25. neurologist
  26. officially
  27. patients
  28. power
  29. problem
  30. psychiatrist
  31. real
  32. receive
  33. renamed
  34. sclerosis
  35. sexism
  36. slater
  37. staying
  38. studied
  39. times
  40. today
  41. treat
  42. tumors
  43. undiagnosed
  44. untreatable
  45. verbatim
  46. women
  47. words
  48. years