The terrorist inside my husband's brain

I am also very mindful about the dangers of telling people things that will alter how they interact with you.

Combining these I find it likely that there be a very high bar for knowing something like that - especially as it is likely a personal suspicion. Not all doctors qualify as over this bar.

Of course I would actively seek a doctor I was comfortable disclosing everything to, yet I understand a reluctance to do so.

It was such traumatic event for the entire society, due to its stark reminder that we weren't safe, and the modern world hadn't solved every problem, after decades of comfort.

There's a feedback cycle of increased fear, leading to unrealistic demands to fix it, leading to "solutions" that are immensely amplified by the media, and the politician's justifications of the solutions. That leads to increased fear...ad nauseum, to the point that you could credibly do a "Exisentially frightening" find and replace for every instance of "terrorism" and "Exisentially frightening (noun)" for terrorist. They're increasingly synonymous, and terrorist is the one losing definitive meaning.

I don't blame politics for this. We elect them by popular vote, and don't usually reward them for giving us a stern talking to, rather than addressing our exisential fears. But, they could have avoided the types of solutions they've trumpeted. Solutions that killed tens of thousands of Americans and foreigners, altered the way we live, and wasted trillions of dollars that should have been spent lifting ourselves up.

The terrorists won. They've done exactly what we know they wanted: create vast fear in the populace, and impose high economic costs, with relatively small acts committed by madmen.

Hopefully we start choosing more reasonable solutions, responsibly fund the ones we've found (the TSA caused multi-day delays in major cities this summer), and stop demanding the impossible from our politicians. Popular opinion about Middle East military action is tortured logic. You can't be mad about Iraq, Libya, and Syria. They express the full spectrum of action we can take — at least, as far as the general public perceives it. There's interesting distinctions, but few are well-informed enough to have that be informing their opinion.

Going out on a limb I'd say that debugging is a skill that's learned in practice, not taught, so if it was as easy to "debug" the human body as it is to debug a computer program, why would computer programmers be better at debugging in their domain then doctors are in theirs? Surely doctors would have varying degrees of skill in this regard, but so do programmers, and it's likely that a) "good" doctors would count this "debugging" as one of their most important skills and b) that Robin Williams had really good doctors.

These factors seem to make diagnostic medicine quite challenging:

* It's often impossible to gather the information you need to make a certain diagnosis without an endless series of tests that may be prohibitively expensive or dangerous to the patient's health themselves.

* Feedback to attempts to "probe" the problem e.g. trying a course of a certain medication may be very difficult to interpret because of delayed reaction, individually unique responses, and/or other external factors that make it difficult to attribute some observed effect to cause X.

* The patient is not getting any younger this whole time, and may become impatient with the process and accept an imperfect solution or simply not have enough time due to the progress of their illness for all avenues to be explored.

* Patients may deliberately hide some of their symptoms, e.g. the article's author's theory that her husband was keeping hallucinations secret.