There's an old joke about two blind men who, having never before encountered an elephant, are asked to describe it based on what they can touch of it. The one man, brought to the elephant's trunk, has a completely different description from the other, who was brought to its hind leg.
There's a famous experiment, proposed as a test for artificial intelligence, in which a person queries two entities about themselves and tries to determine which of the two is a man, and which is a machine.
And then there's the famous "black box" which, in theory, creates solutions from inputs, without any single entity knowing what it does to "create order from chaos". The black box is, in other words, magick.
Each of these requires that someone (or some thing) create a definition and a solution to a problem based on insufficient, empirical data.
The descriptions, and the proposed actions for dealing with the "thing" in the room may be completely unrelated to — and inappropriate for dealing with — elephants (or intelligent machines), but it's the best solution that can be determined based on the available information.
When we see a doctor for a sore throat, aching ankle, or any other acute issue, the elephant in the examination room is within us, and we are the blind men trying to describe it.
Fortunately for us, most of our doctors have felt their way around enough of the elephant to make a reasonably good assessment of it, and they have a crib sheet on what to do in case of elephant attacks. Our elephants, though, may come disguised as cheetahs, and our cheetahs, disguised as mountain goats. If the doctor prepares us for a cheetah instead of an elephant, we may get buried under when the elephant does, well, what elephants do (and they do enough of it to bury a man).
The problem is that unless our doctors know the actual causes of our illnesses, all they can do is treat the symptoms. Finding the causes is as much an art as trying to describe the entire elephant from running one's hand briefly over its leg. If you have a sore throat, your doctor can take a strep culture. If it comes back positive, you can be treated for strep throat. If it doesn't, then the doctor can only treat the irritation, the fever (if you have one), and the congestion (if you have any), and hope that your body can figure out how to fight whatever's causing your discomfort before it (literally) kills you.
While we know, at least in general terms, what causes colds, sore throats, sprained ankles, and influenza, we are largely at sea as to what causes hypertension, diabetes, Raynaud's, and many other chronic diseases. [While we understand that sometimes these are caused by autoimmune reactions which are coded for in mutated genes, we don't know what causes them to express themselves in one person but not her identical twin, and we don't know what causes them when there are no antibodies to suggest those mutations.] As a result, the doctor can only alleviate our symptoms — whether they be elevated blood glucose, high blood pressure, goutish pain, or swollen ankles.
Until we can find and resolve the causes of our pain and suffering, our ailments will remain the elephants in the examination room.
