Ideas

 We all hear of gardeners with the "green thumb". I could water a plant and prune it in the same way that you would. But I could end up killing it all the same, even though I did nothing differently. Or at least, materially speaking, my actions were the same. So what happens? There are doctors who have gone down in history who do the same thing: assess a patient's situation (the medical term, I believe is anamnesis) by asking him the right questions and looking into his family history; but then there are those who have the instinctive capacity to recognize that something is not quite right by simple observation and correlation.  The hidden link, of course, is empathy. But empathy is so difficult to explain scientifically. It can turn wishy washy in a heartbeat, and is notoriously unreliable. I might think I understand what you are going through, I might even stand convinced that I understand you much better because I can imagine your predicament as well as being knowledge