Clinical context refers to the infinity of factors & influences that actually shape a patient and a doctor's experience and interpretation of the patients symptoms and illness. The patient's symptoms are inseparable from the patient's thoughts, words and deeds.
Using cancer as an example of how context shapes the clinical manifestation of illness, the structural and functional manifestations of cancer are determined by factors such as glucose levels, body temperature, nutritional status, sleep deprivation, toxicity, fatigue, hormonal and neurological stress...this list goes one and on. The present manifestation of structural and functional symptoms of cancer are inseparable from, and brought into manifestation by every other structure and function both within one’s personal three bodies. Those three bodies are inseparable from and brought into manifestation by a world seemingly outside our bodies as well as by seemingly other people and beings.
In short, everything causes everything. All is one. Our symptoms are the result of an infinite number of causes and conditions. The physician and patient together agree on the behavioral causes that seem to be most “causative” and are also under one’s control, subject to one’s conscious, will or influence.
Acute symptoms
Returning to the example of a cancer patient, we observe that the patient’s acute symptoms such as headache, fatigue acute inflammation, pain, moods are influenced by both their ways of living and their short term actions, for example, what they have eaten or have not eaten today, their present breathing, posturing and muscular tension.
Chronic symptoms
The chronic manifestations of cancer may include tumors, metastises, pain, loss of weight, fatigue. These “symptoms” are most often the results of actions repeated chronically over long periods.*
* such as social isolation, anger, poor nutrition, exposure to Environmental poisons, inadequate breathing, movement..
Context is everything.
Every part is vitalized, animated, created, nourished, protected, and destroyed by the whole. The whole and each part of the whole is constantly changing while remaining the same. The body, the tumor and every cell in it is changing constantly while remaining the same.
I am not speaking of a reality that might exist elsewhere than in our experience of that reality. I am speaking of, and describing each person's personal experience, of what occurs and how it occurs in one’s personal experience. There well may exist a reality beyond the reality of each person's experience, I have nothing to say about the possible existence of such realities.