Diagnosing Disease

In Bill Wallace’s Physiology class, 11th and 12th grade students partake in a unit focused on diagnosing disease, taking turns playing the part of patient and physician.

“It’s a physiology course, but it’s not the typical ‘here’s how the brain works, here’s how the heart works,’ sort of thing,” says Bill. “Every year I use a disease as a theme, and this year we’re studying aging and cancer, and how they’re related to each other. There are some core things that from year to year remain the same, although they’re applied to different diseases. At the beginning I show a documentary about the disease, so the kids can develop an empathy for it. This year we watched a documentary about progeria, which is a sped-up version of aging, called Life According to Sam; the filmmakers, Andrea and Sean Fine, are GDS parents, so they were able to come and talk about putting the documentary together, and what they learned from Sam Berns.”

Students are currently focused on learning how physicians diagnose diseases. Each student is assigned a disease, and asked to research its symptoms, causes, and nature. As they pair off and begin to ask questions, the heart of the exercise becomes clear—it’s not about instantly “solving a problem,” and coming up with a correct diagnosis, but pursuing the chain of logic, and learning how to think from a scientific point of view. Nothing is taken for granted, and students understand the importance of asking the right questions and gathering data and evidence before making a conjecture about what ails their patient.

After this unit, the course will delve further into the science of aging, talking about the epidemiology and pathology of it, what happens with genetics, and how cells react to the aging process, guaranteeing students receive multiple perspectives on the same disease.

“That gives them a chance to think, to bring all these things to bear on one particular disease. That’s one of the important things I want to try to achieve,” Bill notes. “The idea is that they research the disease with an emphasis on the thinking process, and not ‘did you get the right diagnosis?’ I wanted to keep emphasizing different types of evidence to look at, and then how do you use this evidence to come up with your final diagnosis.”