Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: Extraordinary Journeys into the Human Brain

by Allan H. Ropper

Think about it: There are more diseases of the muscle, just the muscle, which is a tiny sliver of neurology, than there are all diseases of the lungs. There are more diseases of the spinal cord than there are of all diseases of the heart. There are more diseases of the white matter, not the whole brain, but just the white matter, than there are of all the rheumatologic and joint diseases. Neurology has more diseases and more complexity and more need for exquisite clinical analysis than any other branch of medicine. Take one little piece of neurology: there is more to it than in the totality of any other medical specialty. And yet lung disease and heart disease dominate our collective fears. Dermatology is the only field that has more diseases than neurology. There are a billion skin diseases, but only ten of them occur with any regularity. Whereas in neurology people may say, “Oh, it’s just a stroke,” well, strokes are a big proportion of neurological cases, but there’s so much else to it: What kind of stroke? Where did it occur? What caused it? To master all that is a lifetime effort. So if you really want to be challenged instead of being bored in seven years, when you know all there is to know in your specialty, you may wish to consider neurology.