I have acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive type of cancer. The typical prognosis is 3-6 months to live, but I would like to stress that is for a patient who is not receiving treatment.
Addiction has a worse prognosis than most cancers. I tell someone they have cancer and they want to be airlifted to a cancer treatment center; I tell someone they have an addiction and they're going to die and they want to argue with me about the treatment.
For a seriously autistic kid, the best prognosis might be getting into a mainstream school without being too much of a shadow. For a moderately autistic kid the best prognosis is full recovery.
Just like medicine anywhere else, I get to walk through life with people in the midst sometimes of their most difficult and challenging circumstances they've faced - a terminal diagnosis, bad news, poor prognosis - and also the most joyful times with people, like the birth of a new baby.
Bin Laden's death is just a punctuation point on a set of problems they've had for a long time. I think the prognosis for al-Qaida and groups like it is really bad, and that's a good thing.
The diagnosis that poverty, lack of education, or lack of opportunities have much to do with terrorism requires a fundamentally optimistic view of human nature. This diagnosis leads to the prognosis that all we need to do to solve the terrorism problem is to create societies that are less poor, better educated and have more opportunities.
I feel great, the prognosis is excellent.
