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The Concept of Disease
Edited by Mary Jean Walker (La Trobe University)
About this topic
| Summary | In the debate about the concept of disease the term is usually used in a broad sense, to include any non-healthy condition (such as injuries, poisoning, etc.) and interchangeably with ‘pathology’. The debate has focused on two main views, naturalism and normativism, and the issue of whether disease and health can be defined in a way that is value-neutral. Some recent work challenges the assumptions of this debate, such as that disease is a concept structured around necessary and sufficient conditions, and that philosophical analysis should focus on a biomedical notion of disease. Associated with this, other conceptual structures and alternative notions taking pragmatic, epidemiological, or public health perspectives have been put forward. |
| Key works | The naturalist position is represented by the biostatistical theory, developed by Christopher Boorse in several classic papers (1977; 1975; 1976) and defended against critiques in 1997 and 2014. Normativist views are developed by, for example, Canguilhem & Cohen 2012, Nordenfelt 1987, and Cooper 2002. Some argue that disease involves both descriptive and evaluative aspects, a position referred to as either a hybrid theory or as weak normativism, for example Wakefield 2014 and Ereshefsky 2009. Critiques of the traditional debate and alternative approaches are provided by Schwartz 2007 and Sadegh-Zadeh 2000. |
| Introductions | Cooper 2016; Murphy 2015; Boorse 2011 |
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Related
Siblings
- Diagnosis (337)
- Epidemiology (120)
- Medicalization (14)
- Nosology (185)
- Chronic Diseases (1,262)
- Infectious Diseases (2,120 | 236)
- Disease, Misc (232)
- Mental Disorders (3,533 | 1,165)
- Cognitive Disabilities and Disorders (1,052 | 182)
Contents
828 found
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| 1 — 50 / 828 |
- An Ontological Argument against Mandatory Face-Masks.Michael Kowalik - manuscriptFace-coverings were widely mandated during the Covid-19 pandemic, on the assumption that they limit the spread of respiratory viruses and are therefore likely to save lives. I examine the following ethical dilemma: if the use of face-masks in social settings can save lives then are we obliged to wear them at all times in those settings? I argue that by en-masking the face in a way that is phenomenally inconsistent with or degraded from what we are innately programmed to detect (...)
- A Domino Theory of Disease.H. Fagerberg - forthcoming - Philosophy of Science.This paper advances a theory of disease as domino dysfunction. It is often argued that diseases are biological dysfunctions. However, a theory of disease as biological dysfunction is complicated by some plausible cases of dysfunction, which seem clearly non-pathological. I argue that pathological conditions are not just dysfunctions but domino dysfunctions, and that domino dysfunctions can be distinguished on principled biological grounds from non-pathological dysfunctions. I then show how this theory can make sense of the problem cases; they are not (...)
- Infinity, Technology, Degeneracy: A Note on Werkhoven’s Dispositional Theory of Health.Shane N. Glackin - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science:axz033.Werkhoven’s ‘A Dispositional Theory of Health’ is an important and original contribution to debates about the disease concept, which persuasively demonstrates that dispositions must play some role in a full account of what it is to be healthy or ill. Unfortunately, as a theory, it cannot as it stands be correct.I first demonstrate what appears to be a significant, and possibly fatal, flaw; the proliferation of dispositions which Werkhoven’s theory requires makes impossible, at least in the absence of significant further (...)
- Health, Illness and Disease: Philosophical Essays.Virginia Langum - forthcoming - Medical Humanities.
- The Medical Model of “Obesity” and the Values Behind the Guise of Health.Kayla R. Mehl - forthcoming - Synthese 201 (6):1-28.Assumptions about obesity—e.g., its connection to ill health, its causes, etc.—are still prevalent today, and they make up what I call the medical model of fatness. In this paper, I argue that the medical model was established on the basis of insufficient evidence and has nevertheless continued to be relied upon to justify methodological choices that further entrench the assumptions of the medical model. These choices are illegitimate in so far as they conflict with both the epistemic and social aims (...)
- Medicine and Meaning in Life.Thaddeus Metz - forthcoming - In Alex Broadbent (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Medicine. Oxford University Press.Insofar as value theory is relevant to the philosophy of medicine, two goods have dominated reflection: well-being and morality. This essay casts doubt on whether those values are sufficient to resolve an array of important debates about medical practice, maintaining that the value of what makes a life meaningful should play a much larger role. After first indicating how meaningfulness differs from happiness and rightness, the essay argues that meaningfulness cannot reasonably be ignored when thinking comprehensively about the proper aims (...)Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - Mild Mania and the Theory of Health: A Response to "Mild Mania and Well-Being".Professor Lennart Nordenfelt - forthcoming - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 1 (3):179-184.In this response to "Mild Mania and Well-Being" I propose a different analytic strategy and scrutinize the presented case of mild mania within the framework of a holistic theory of health. I distinguish between the following fundamental questions: (1) is mild mania a disease or illness? (2) does the mild mania of Mr. M. reduce his health significantly? and (3) should Mr. M. be recommended treatment with lithium or not? I answer the first question in the affirmative. I propose some (...)
- Disease: An Ill-Founded Concept at Odds with the Principle of Patient-Centred Medicine.Arandjelovic Ognjen - forthcoming - Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice.Background: Despite the at least decades long record of philosophical recognition and interest, the intricacy of the deceptively familiar appearing concepts of ‘disease’, ‘disorder’, ‘disability’, etc., has only recently begun showing itself with clarity in the popular discourse wherein its newly emerging prominence stems from the liberties and restrictions contingent upon it. Whether a person is deemed to be afflicted by a disease or a disorder governs their ability to access health care, be it free at the point of use (...)
- The Disease Loophole: Index Terms and Their Role in Disease Misclassification.Alex N. Roberts - forthcoming - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy.The definitions of disease proffered by philosophers and medical actors typically require that a state of ill health be linked to some known bodily dysfunction before it is classified as a disease. I argue that such definitions of disease are not fully implementable in current medical discourse and practice. Adhering to the definitions would require that medical actors keep close track of the current state of knowledge on the causes and mechanisms of particular illnesses. Yet, unaddressed problems in medical terminology (...)
- Mental disorders in entangled brains.Awais Aftab - 2024 - Philosophical Psychology 37 (3):583-595.In this commentary on Anneli Jefferson’s book “Are Mental Disorders Brain Disorders?,” I offer an overview of her central thesis, and then propose my own modified account of when we are justified in calling mental disorders as “brain disorders.” In doing so, I draw on recent work in neuroscience that understands the relationship between brain and behavior in complex, dynamic, and computational terms. In particular, I disagree with Jefferson’s criterion of sufficiency, that a particular brain process should always realize a (...)
- Kurt Goldstein, de la clinique des lésions cérébrales au soin et à l’accompagnement des maladies chroniques et du handicap : soigner la personne, « réarranger le milieu ».Agathe Camus - 2024 - Philosophia Scientiae 28-3 (28-3):95-116.Goldstein’s conceptions of pathological states as specific relationships to the milieu, based on his clinical work and observations with First World War soldiers with brain injuries, pay unprecedented attention to chronicity as a particular form of the pathological, capable of stabilizing in forms of health. From this stems a concept of holistic care which pays attention to the person as a whole and to the possibilities for restructuring his or her relationship with the milieu. While the directions he took in (...)
- No, Pregnancy is Not a Disease.Nicholas Colgrove & Daniel Rodger - 2024 - Journal of Medical Ethics (Online first):1-3.Anna Smajdor and Joona Räsänen argue that we have good reason to classify pregnancy as a disease. They discuss five accounts of disease and argue that each account either implies that pregnancy is a disease or, if it does not, it faces problems. This strategy allows Smajdor and Räsänen to avoid articulating their own account of disease. Consequently, they cannot establish that pregnancy is a disease, only that plausible accounts of disease suggest this. Some readers will dismiss Smajdor and Räsänen’s (...)
- Santé et pathologie au prisme du milieu : les ambivalences de la pensée de Kurt Goldstein.Marco Dal Pozzolo - 2024 - Philosophia Scientiae 28-3 (28-3):75-94.Kurt Goldstein’s thinking on health and disease is based on the concept of milieu [Umwelt], which he inherited from the ethologist Jacob von Uexküll, while at the same time reforming the concept in an original way. Goldstein’s interpretation of the organism-environment relationship emphasises the dynamic nature of this relationship and the reciprocal structuring of the two poles; this hypothesis forms the basis of his original conception of pathology as the shrinking of the patient’s environment. The German neurologist’s position is characterized (...)
- Brain Disorders, Dysfunctions, and Natural Selection: Commentary on Jefferson.Justin Garson - 2024 - Philosophical Psychology 37 (3):558-569.I argue that despite the merits of Jefferson’s account of a brain disorder, which are many, the notion of function she deploys is unsuitable to the overall goals of that account. In particular, Jefferson accepts Cummins’ causal role theory of function and dysfunction. As the causal role view, in its standard elaborations, is wedded to human interests, goals, and values, it cannot serve as a value-neutral anchor for her hybrid “harm-dysfunction” account of disorder. I argue that the selected effects theory, (...)
- Computational psychiatry and the evolving concept of a mental disorder.Konstantin Genin, Thomas Grote & Thomas Wolfers - 2024 - Synthese 204 (3):1-23.As a discipline, psychiatry is in the process of finding the right set of concepts to organize research and guide treatment. Dissatisfaction with the status quo as expressed in standard manuals has animated a number of computational paradigms, each proposing to rectify the received concept of mental disorder. We explore how different computational paradigms: normative modeling, network theory and learning-theoretic approaches like reinforcement learning and active inference, reconceptualize mental disorders. Although each paradigm borrows heavily from machine learning, they differ significantly (...)
- Interventionism and Intelligibility: Why Depression is not (Always) a Brain Disease.Quinn Hiroshi Gibson - 2024 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 49 (2):160-177.Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a serious condition with a large disease burden. It is often claimed that MDD is a “brain disease.” What would it mean for MDD to be a brain disease? I argue that the best interpretation of this claim is as offering a substantive empirical hypothesis about the causes of the syndrome of depression. This syndrome-causal conception of disease, combined with the idea that MDD is a disease of the brain, commits the brain disease conception of (...)
- Own-world and Common World in Schizophrenia: Towards a Theory of Anthropological Proportions.Kasper Møller Nielsen - 2024 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 23 (4):903-923.The conceptual pair of own-world (ídios kósmos) and common world (koinós kósmos) constitutes an archaic pair, originally introduced by Heraclitus. More than two millennia after its introduction, Binswanger picked up this conceptual pair in the attempt to understand existence and mental disorder. Ever since, this conceptual pair has been part of the conceptualization of schizophrenia in phenomenological psychopathology. However, the concepts of ídios kósmos and koinós kósmos have seldomly been elaborated and expanded upon, and certain unclarities rest within the literature. (...)
- Mental Disorder (Illness).Jennifer Radden & Jonathan Y. Tsou - 2024 - Https://Plato.Stanford.Edu/Entries/Mental-Disorder/.Mental disorder (earlier entitled “illness” or “disease”) is ascribed to deviations from normal thoughts, reasoning, feelings, attitudes, and actions that are considered socially or personally dysfunctional and apt for treatment. Schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder are core examples. The concept of mental disorder plays a role in many domains, including medicine, social sciences such as psychology and anthropology, and the humanities, including literature and philosophy. Philosophical discussions are the primary focus of the present entry, which differs from the entry on (...)
- Mental Disorder (Illness).Jennifer Radden & Jonathan Y. Tsou - 2024 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.Mental disorder (earlier entitled “illness” or “disease”) is ascribed to deviations from normal thoughts, reasoning, feelings, attitudes, and actions that are considered socially or personally dysfunctional and apt for treatment. Schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder are core examples. The concept of mental disorder plays a role in many domains, including medicine, social sciences such as psychology and anthropology, and the humanities, including literature and philosophy. Philosophical discussions are the primary focus of the present entry, which differs from the entry on (...)
- Introduction: Disease, illness, sickness, philosophical perspectives.Andrés Francisco Contreras Sánchez & Agata J. Bąk - 2024 - Estudios de Filosofía (Universidad de Antioquia) 70:5-12.
- Exploring health and disease concepts in healthcare practice: an empirical philosophy of medicine study.Rik R. van der Linden & Maartje H. N. Schermer - 2024 - BMC Medical Ethics 25 (1):1-15.In line with recent proposals for experimental philosophy and philosophy of science in practice, we propose that the philosophy of medicine could benefit from incorporating empirical research, just as bioethics has. In this paper, we therefore take first steps towards the development of an empirical philosophy of medicine, that includes investigating practical and moral dimensions. This qualitative study gives insight into the views and experiences of a group of various medical professionals and patient representatives regarding the conceptualization of health and (...)
- En la constitución de una filosofía de la vida y la enfermedad, el trabajo epistemológico y axiológico de sus conceptos y problemas fundamentales.Z. Alejandro Bilbao - 2023 - Revista de filosofía (Chile) 80:15-33.En este artículo se establece un análisis histórico, axiológico y epistemológico de las condiciones de advenimiento de una filosofía médica abocada al estudio de la enfermedad. El examen de estas condiciones toma en cuenta los estudios clásicos y contemporáneos de la filosofía de la medicina, analizando sus distintas perspectivas y enunciados. La reflexión en torno de los supuestos y conceptos asociados a tal tipo de filosofía, localiza la enfermedad en sus distintas dimensiones: en el ámbito del acontecimiento biológico (disease), del (...)
- Narcissism A Focal Point for Examining the Interrelatedness of Psychology and Philosophy.Lydia Amir - 2023 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 30 (2):169-172.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Narcissism A Focal Point for Examining the Interrelatedness of Psychology and PhilosophyLydia Amir, PhD (bio)In a groundbreaking article, Aleksandar Fatic challenges the view that mental health is to be dissociated from morality or ethics. His argument targets cluster B personality disorders, such as Borderline and Narcissistic Personality Disorders, but focuses mainly on narcissistic disorders, whether diagnosed or not. Although these persons are not exempt of moral and legal responsibility, (...)
- Is Autism a Mental Disorder According to the Harmful Dysfunction View?Mladen Bošnjak - 2023 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 23 (67):89-111.The supporters of the neurodiversity movement contend that autism is not a mental disorder, but rather a natural human variation. In a recent paper Jerome Wakefi eld, David Wasserman and Jordan Conrad (2020) argued against this view relying on Wakefi eld’s harmful dysfunction theory of mental disorder (the HD theory). Although I argue that the HD theory is problematic, I contend that arguments offered by Wakefi eld et al. (2020) against those of the neurodiversity movement are plausible, except in one (...)
- Mental disorder: An ability-based view.Sanja Dembic - 2023 - Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 4.What is it to have a mental disorder? The paper proposes an ability-based view of mental disorder. It argues that such a view is preferable to biological dysfunction views such as Wakefield’s Harmful Dysfunction Analysis and Boorse’s Biostatistical Theory. According to the proposed view, having a mental disorder is basically a matter of having a certain type of inability (or: an ability that is not sufficiently high): the inability to respond adequately to some of one’s available reasons in some of (...)
- Brain dysfunction without function.Harriet Fagerberg - 2023 - Philosophical Psychology 1 (3):570-582.In an important and timely book, Anneli Jefferson outlines a view according to which a given mental disorder is a brain disorder if it is a (harmful) mental dysfunction realised by a brain dysfunction. Prima facie, Jefferson’s book is a study in the metaphysics of dysfunction: how does mental dysfunction relate to brain dysfunction, and what does this imply for the status of mental disorders and brain disorders? In what follows, I shall argue that Jefferson’s contribution to this debate is (...)
- (1 other version)Medical Disorder Is Not a Black Box Essentialist Concept.Harriet Fagerberg - 2023 - Philosophy of Medicine 4 (1).Defining Mental Disorder: Jerome Wakefield and His Critics, edited by Denis Forest and Luc Faucher, is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of medicine whose work is informed by that of Jerome Wakefield, or the disease debate in general. If you are anything like me, this book will open the door to a new depth of understanding of the harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA) and its methodical underpinnings, and an enriched appreciation of what is at stake in defining medical (...)
- (1 other version)What we argue about when we argue about disease.Harriet Fagerberg - 2023 - Philosophy of Medicine 4 (1):1-20.The disease debate in philosophy of medicine has traditionally been billed as a debate over the correct conceptual analysis of the term “disease.” This paper argues that although the debate’s participants overwhelmingly claim to be in the business of conceptual analysis, they do not tend to argue as if this is the case. In particular, they often show a puzzling disregard for key parameters such as precise terminology, linguistic community, and actual usage. This prima facie strange feature of the debate (...)
- Mental Disorder, Meaning-making, and Religious Engagement.Kate Finley - 2023 - Theologica 7 (1).Meaning-making plays a central role in how we deal with experiences of suffering, including those due to mental disorder. And for many, religious beliefs, experiences, and practices (hereafter, religious engagement) play a central role in informing this meaning-making. However, a crucial facet of the relationship between experiences of mental disorder and religious engagement remains underexplored—namely the potentially positive effects of mental disorder on religious engagement (e.g. experiences of bipolar disorder increasing sense of God’s presence). In what follows, I will present (...)
- What Makes a Disorder 'Mental'? A Practical Treatment of Psychiatric Disorder.Joseph Gough - 2023 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 30 (1):15-35.Abstract:The titular question, of what makes a disorder 'mental,' has an obvious answer: mental disorders are disorders of the mind. I argue that this is not so, before proposing a positive theory of what makes a disorder 'mental,' that what makes a disorder 'mental' is its relationship to psychiatry. The overall thrust of my argument is that mental disorder is mental in name only—to have a mental disorder is not to have a disorder of the mind. Instead, mental disorder is (...)
- The skill of mental health: Towards a new theory of mental health and disorder.Garson Leder & Tadeusz Zawidzki - 2023 - Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 4.This paper presents a naturalist skill-based alternative to traditional function-based naturalist theories of mental health and disorder. According to the novel skill view outlined here, mental health is a skilled action of individuals, rather than a question of the functioning of mental mechanisms. Mental disorder is the failure or breakdown of this skill. This skill view of mental health is motivated by focusing on the process of mental healing. This paper argues that, when we start with a focus on how (...)
- Minding Psychiatric Practice.Paul B. Lieberman - 2023 - Philosophy Psychiatry and Psychology 30 (1):37-39.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Minding Psychiatric PracticePaul B. Lieberman, MD (bio)In recent discussions of what makes or should make something 'a psychiatric disorder' (if anything does; Lange, 2007), attention and contention have mostly involved problems distinguishing disorder from normal life, expectable suffering, neurological disease, criminality, prejudice, error, religious experience and effects of injustice, but the question of what makes or should make something psychiatric is also important and difficult to answer. It's important (...)
- Are All Mental Disorders Affective Disorders?Michelle Maiese - 2023 - Passion: Journal of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotion 1 (1):31-49.A growing number of theorists have looked to the enactivist approach in philosophy of mind or the affordance-based approach from ecological psychology to make sense of a wide variety of phenomena; some theorists believe that these theoretical accounts can offer rich insights about the nature of mental disorders, their etiology, and their characteristic symptoms. I argue that theorists who adopt such approaches also should embrace the further claim that all mental disorders are affective disorders. First, enactivist accounts of mental disorder (...)
- What Is Psychiatry About?Dominic Murphy - 2023 - Philosophy Psychiatry and Psychology 30 (1):41-43.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Is Psychiatry About?Dominic Murphy, PhD (bio)There are no such things as minds, but there are animate objects who behave differently from other types of natural entity. They move around under their own power, and some of their activity seems to be very different from that of other natural objects. Furthermore, some of our predictions about these objects are disproved in interesting ways; if we make a false prediction (...)
- Conspiracy Theory Belief: A Sane Response to an Insane World?Joseph M. Pierre - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-26.Are conspiracy theory beliefs pathological? That depends on what is meant by "pathological." This paper begins by unpacking that ill-defined and value-laden term before making the case that widespread conspiracy theory belief should not be conceptualized through the “othering’ perspective of individual psychopathology. In doing so, it adopts a phenomenological perspective to argue that conspiracy theory beliefs can be reliably distinguished from paranoid delusions based on falsity, belief conviction, idiosyncrasy, and self-referentiality. A socio-epistemic model is then presented that characterizes the (...)
- Does Schizophrenia Exist?Georg Repnikov - 2023 - Philosophy of Medicine 4 (1).This paper develops and defends a deflationary analysis of existence claims involving psychiatric disorders. According to this analysis, a given psychiatric disorder exists if, and only if, there are people who have the disorder. The implications of this analysis are spelled out for our views of nosological decision making, and for the relationship between claims about the existence of psychiatric disorders and claims about their reality. A pragmatic view of psychiatric nosology is defended and it is argued that worries about (...)
- The biopsychosocial model: Its use and abuse.Alex Roberts - 2023 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 26 (3):367-384.The biopsychosocial model (BPSM) is increasingly influential in medical research and practice. Several philosophers and scholars of health have criticized the BPSM for lacking meaningful scientific content. This article extends those critiques by showing how the BPSM’s epistemic weaknesses have led to certain problems in medical discourse. Despite its lack of content, many researchers have mistaken the BPSM for a scientific model with explanatory power. This misapprehension has placed researchers in an implicit bind. There is an expectation that applications of (...)
- Preclinical Disease or Risk Factor? Alzheimer’s Disease as a Case Study of Changing Conceptualizations of Disease.Maartje H. N. Schermer - 2023 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 48 (4):322-334.Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) provides an excellent case study to investigate emerging conceptions of health, disease, pre-disease, and risk. Two scientific working groups have recently reconceptualized AD and created a new category of asymptomatic biomarker positive persons, who are either said to have preclinical AD, or to be at risk for AD. This article examines how prominent theories of health and disease would classify this condition: healthy or diseased? Next, the notion of being “at risk”—a state somewhere in-between health and disease—is (...)
- Knowledge, Life, and Error. Nietzschean Themes in the Work of Georges Canguilhem.Henning Schmidgen - 2023 - In Giuseppe Bianco, Charles T. Wolfe & Gertrudis Van de Vijver (eds.), Canguilhem and Continental Philosophy of Biology. Springer. pp. 147-157.It is well known that authors such as Emile Chartier, i.e. Alain, Henri Bergson and Kurt Goldstein impacted importantly on the work of Georges Canguilhem. This paper argues, however, that it is the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche which gave Canguilhem’s work its most distinctive traits. Themes such as the relationship between health and disease, the influence of language on perception and knowledge, or the conception of philosophy as a philosophy of values, are obviously Nietzschean. The paper shows that in Nietzsche (...)
- Severity as a moral qualifier of malady.Carl Tollef Solberg, Mathias Barra, Lars Sandman & Bjorn Hoffmann - 2023 - BMC Medical Ethics 24 (1):1-7.The overarching aim of this article is to scrutinize how severity can work as a qualifier for the moral impetus of malady. While there is agreement that malady is of negative value, there is disagreement about precisely how this is so. Nevertheless, alleviating disease, injury, and associated suffering is almost universally considered good. Furthermore, the strength of a diseased person’s moral claims for our attention and efforts will inevitably vary. This article starts by reflecting on what kind of moral impetus (...)
- (1 other version)Understanding in Medicine.Varga Somogy - 2023 - Erkenntnis (8):3025-3049.This paper aims to clarify the nature of understanding in medicine. The first part describes in more detail what it means to understand something and links a type of understanding (i.e., objectual understanding) to explanations. The second part proceeds to investigate what objectual understanding of a disease (i.e., biomedical understanding) requires by considering the case of scurvy from the history of medi- cine. The main hypothesis is that grasping a mechanistic explanation of a condi- tion is necessary for a biomedical (...)
- Why It (Also) Matters What Infectious Disease Epidemiologists Call “Disease”.David Stoellger - 2023 - Philosophy of Medicine 4 (1).Infectious diseases figure prominently as (counter)examples in debates on how to conceptualize “disease.” But crucial epidemiological distinctions are often not heeded in the debate, and pathological and clinical perspectives focusing on individual patients are favored at the expense of perspectives from epidemiology focusing on populations. In clarifying epidemiological concepts, this paper highlights the distinct contributions infectious disease epidemiology can make to the conception of “disease,” and the fact that this is at least tacitly recognized by medical personnel and philosophers. Crucially, (...)
- An account of medical treatment, with a preliminary account of medical conditions.Steven Tresker - 2023 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 44 (6):607-633.In this article, I present a philosophical account of medical treatment. In support of this account, I offer a suggestive account of medical conditions. The account of medical treatment uses three desiderata to demarcate treatment from non-treatment. Namely, a treatment should: (1) be describable by features that enable it to be standardized and characterized as a discrete intervention, (2) target a specific medical condition, and (3) have the possibility of being effective. The account of medical conditions underlies the second desideratum (...)
- (1 other version)Understanding in Medicine.Somogy Varga - 2023 - Erkenntnis 134 (8):3025-3049.This paper aims to clarify the nature of understanding in medicine. The first part describes in more detail what it means to understand something and links a type of understanding (i.e., objectual understanding) to explanations. The second part proceeds to investigate what objectual understanding of a disease (i.e., biomedical understanding) requires by considering the case of scurvy from the history of medicine. The main hypothesis is that grasping a mechanistic explanation of a condition is necessary for a biomedical understanding of (...)
- Correction to: Experimental philosophy of medicine and the concepts of health and disease.Walter Veit - 2023 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 44 (1):99-100.
- Socializing Psychiatric Kinds : A Pluralistic Explanatory Account of the Nature and Classification of Psychopathology.Tuomas Vesterinen - 2023 - Dissertation, University of HelsinkiThis thesis investigates the nature of psychiatric disorders, and to what extent they can form a basis for classification, explanation, and treatment interventions. These questions are important in the light of the “crisis of validity” in psychiatry, according to which current diagnostic categories do not pick out real disorders. I address the questions by defending an account of psychiatric disorders that can better accommodate social aspects and non-epistemic values than the symptom-based model of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental (...)
- Categories of health and disease/illness in the philosophy of medicine: biomedical and humanistic models.О. С Гилязова - 2023 - Siberian Journal of Philosophy 21 (2):81-92.The categories of health and disease/illness are conceptualized from the perspective of the philosophy of medicine. Philosophical contradictions are revealed, which, fueling the debate between naturalism and normativism, prevent biomedicine from developing a single satisfactory understanding of these categories. The theoretical and practical consequences of such biomedicine features as pathocentrism, identification of health with complete well-being, dichotomy of health and disease in the absence of a clear criterion for their differentiation are analyzed. The role of humanistic approaches to the medicine (...)
- Pathologizing Ugliness: A Conceptual Analysis of the Naturalist and Normativist Claims in “Aesthetic Pathology”.Yves Saint James Aquino - 2022 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 47 (6):735-748.Pathologizing ugliness refers to the use of disease language and medical processes to foster and support the claim that undesirable features are pathological conditions requiring medical or surgical intervention. Primarily situated in cosmetic surgery, the practice appeals to the concept of “aesthetic pathology”, which is a medical designation for features that deviate from some designated aesthetic norms. This article offers a two-pronged conceptual analysis of aesthetic pathology. First, I argue that three sets of claims, derived from normativist and naturalistic accounts (...)
- Osteoporosis and risk of fracture: reference class problems are real.Nicholas Binney - 2022 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 43 (5):375-400.Elselijn Kingma argues that Christopher Boorse’s biostatistical theory does not show how the reference classes it uses—namely, age groups of a sex of a species—are objective and naturalistic. Boorse has replied that this objection is of no concern, because there are no examples of clinicians’ choosing to use reference classes other than the ones he suggests. Boorse argues that clinicians use the reference classes they do because these reflect the natural classes of organisms to which their patients belong. Drawing on (...)
- Reconsidering harm in psychiatric manuals within an explicationist framework.Mia Biturajac & Marko Jurjako - 2022 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 25:239–249.The notion of harm has been a recurring and a significant notion in the characterization of mental disorder. It is present in eminent diagnostic manuals such as DSM and ICD, as well as in the discussion on mental disorders in philosophy of psychiatry. Recent demotion of harm in the definition of mental disorders in DSM-5 shows a general trend towards reducing the significance of harm when thinking about the nature of mental disorders. In this paper, we defend the relevance of (...)
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