Reflex Tests

[blueyedevil]

How do the refelx tests help doctors to diagnose disease?

The reflex tests I'm reffering to are the knee and ankle jerk, eyes reaction to light, and reaction times to catch a ruler.

What diseases do they help diagnose?

[Peter Pedant]

Reflexes such as knee jerk test the spinal reflex/arc at that level of the spinal cord - L 4 5 I think.

These are part of a neurological exam.

Putting all the bits of info together then allows the neurologist to make the diagnosis.

Diagnosis - how does he do that. There are no good theories about how doctors diagnose. There was a lot of interest in the sixties (yup!) when they thought that asking a doctor how he diagnosed could be analysed and then put onto a computer. (ho hum). This is rule based diagnosis.

The money ran out and the researchers turned to something else. They have tested a computer against a specialist and got.....computer better on rare diagnoses and specialists better on common diagnoses (I think).

|The other way of diagnosis is pattern recognition. Cardiologists apparently when they look at an ECG use pattern recognition. [God knows how they found that out].

Neurologists - you are going to ask me how neurologists do it......I cant remember.