
Publication details
Publisher: Springer
Place: Berlin
Year: 2017
Pages: 141-162
Series: The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science
ISBN (Hardback): 9783319527666
Full citation:
, "Health, disease, and the basic aims of medicine", in: Eppur si muove, Berlin, Springer, 2017


Health, disease, and the basic aims of medicine
pp. 141-162
in: Marcus P. Adams, Zvi Biener, Uljana Feest, Jacqueline A. Sullivan (eds), Eppur si muove, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
The concepts, health and disease, have received considerable attention in philosophy of medicine. The first goal of this paper is to demonstrate that three prominent analyses of health and disease can be synthesized if one assumes that medicine is both theoretical and practical, and, therefore, value-laden. The second goal of this paper is to give an account of one route by which evaluative and factual claims come together in medical knowledge, during medical conversations between clinicians and patients. Accomplishing these two goals together yields an epistemology of medicine that moves past debates about health and disease. On this view the conceptual foundations of medicine rest on subjective and objective claims about health states and their evaluations. By making subjective and objective claims, patients and clinicians negotiate whether patients' health states are sufficiently dysfunctional to warrant medical intervention, leading to the formation of complementary illness narratives, which are anchored to different degrees in personal experience and medical theory. On this view, health and disease are supplanted as the conceptual foundations of medicine. Rather, medicine is better understood in terms of two basic aims: The first aim of medicine is to fully understand patients in scientific and personal terms; the second aim is to intervene upon patients' states of illness in ways that are consistent with full understanding.
Publication details
Publisher: Springer
Place: Berlin
Year: 2017
Pages: 141-162
Series: The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science
ISBN (Hardback): 9783319527666
Full citation:
, "Health, disease, and the basic aims of medicine", in: Eppur si muove, Berlin, Springer, 2017