Varieties of medical concepts

pp. 57-80

in: Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh, Handbook of analytic philosophy of medicine, Berlin, Springer, 2012

Abstract

As a science and practice of health care with responsibilities for individual and social health affairs, medicine has many objectives including the following ones: (1) to analyze and describe the human body and soul in order to obtain knowledge about human health, illness, and diseases as well as therapy and prevention; and (2) to build general theories on health, illness, diseases, therapy, and prevention. These tasks comprise the following groups of activities that characterize medicine as research and practice: etiology, diagnosis, prognosis, therapy, and prevention of maladies. We shall be concerned with the analysis and philosophy of these activities in the next chapters. To prepare our inquiries and discussions, we must be aware that in fulfilling the tasks above, medicine uses a particular language that we have referred to as medical language in preceding chapters.