This anthology of essays presents a sample of studies from
recent philosophy of medicine addressing issues which attempt to
answer very general (interdependent) questions: (a) what is a
disease and what is health? (b) How do we (causally) explain
diseases? (c) And how do we distinguish diseases, i.e. define
classes of diseases and recognize that an instance X of disease
belongs to a given class B? (d) How do we assess and choose cure/
therapy?
The book is divided into three sections: classification, disease
and evidence. In general, attention is focused on statistics in
medicine and epidemiology, issues in psychiatry and connecting
medicine with evolutionary biology and genetics. Many authors
position the theories that they address within their historical
contexts.
The nature of health and disease will be addressed in several
essays that also touch upon very general questions about the
definition of medicine and its status.Several chapters scrutinize
classification because of its centrality within philosophical
problems raised by medicine and its core position in the
philosophical questioning of psychiatry. Specificities of medical
explanation have recently come under a new light, particularly
because of the rise of statistical methods and several chapters
investigate these methods in specific contexts such as epidemiology
or meta-analysis of random testing. Taken together this collection
addresses the question of how we gather, use and assess evidence
for various medical theories.
The rich assortment of disciplines featured also includes
epidemiology, parasitology and public health, while technical
aspects such as the application of game theory to medical research
and the misuse of the DSM in forensic psychiatry are also given an
airing. The book addresses more than the construction of medical
knowledge, however, adding cogent appraisal of the processes of
decision making in medicine and the protocols used to justify
therapeutic choices."
General
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