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T he fundamental purpose of diagnosis and classification is to isolate a group of discrete disease entities, each of which is characterized by a distinct pathophysiology and/or etiology. Ideally, all diseases in medicine would be defined in terms of etiology. For most illnesses, however, we do not know or understand the specific etiology. By and large, a full understanding of etiology is limited to the infectious diseases, in which the etiology is exposure to some infectious agent to a degree sufficient that the body’s immune mechanisms are overwhelmed. Even in this instance, our knowledge of immune mechanisms is incomplete.
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