WHO, you are kinda cool.

After 2 mind-numbing hours of handwritten speculation on the relevance of developmental norms to child psychopathological assessment (I don't even like kids, much less want to analyze their bizarre little brains), never in a million years would I have guessed that a talk on healthcare classification would actually excite me. Either I'm really deprived for excitement or just really weird: the eroticized Alice in Wonderland this weekend, replete with naked knife-wielding women and a giant dude in drag as The Queen, did nothing for me, but the minutia of coding for dysphagia was TOTALLY AWESOME.

Tired rambling aside, this was actually pretty cool. So the World Health Organization wanted to address the issue of individual differences in healthcare: a one-word diagnosis in a chart doesn't provide much insight to what life is like for a person. WHO created this common numerical language to code for a whole host of issues in a person's life. With a combination of numbers, doctors can indicate not only a medical or mental condition but how it impacts details of the person's everyday functioning, and how their environment helps or hinders them. There's a number for every little part of the body, every little thing people do. EVERYTHING. I don't know who takes the time to think of all this stuff, but I think it's cool they do. There's actually a code for "this guy's illness will make him drool, which will make it difficult to take communion without weirding people out" (slight paraphrase on Shannon's part).

It's a simple, universal shorthand for healthcare providers to communicate medical problems, but also what it means for what the patient does in his or her everyday life, and what in his or her life will make the situation easier or harder. This enables us to consider - quantitatively - all the ways a person is affected by their one-word diagnosis. To anticipate how their life will change and what should be done to help them deal. So with a handful of numbers arranged a certain way, you can communicate all the important things related to a person's diagnosed condition. A way to offer much more complete help than just a label. COOL.