The Aesthetics of Clinical Judgment: Exploring the Link between Diagnostic Elegance and Effective Resource Utilization

Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 2 (2):141-159 (1999)
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Abstract

Many physicians assert that new cost-control mechanisms inappropriately interfere with clinical decision-making. They claim that high costs arise from poorly practiced medicine, and argue that effective utilization of resources is best promoted by advancing the scientific and ethical ideals of medicine. However, the claim is not warranted by empirical evidence. In this essay, I show how it rests upon aesthetic considerations associated with diagnostic elegance. I first consider scientific rationality generally. After a review of analytical empiricist and socio-historical approaches in the philosophy of science, a form of Kant's aesthetic is used to explain how scientific discovery and justification are linked, and to show how meta-theoretical considerations associated with the goals and method of science work together with exemplars of practice. This analysis enables us to understand how the ideals of medicine as a science guide the initial patient history and physical exam in such a way that a parsimonious use of tests is indicated. Aesthetic considerations unite the basic scientific and ethical commitments of the modern medical paradigm and are central for rightly understanding clinical judgment.

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George Khushf
University of South Carolina

Citations of this work

Pleasure in medical practice.Jean-Christophe Weber - 2012 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 15 (2):153-164.
Immanuel Kant, his philosophy and medicine.Urban Wiesing - 2007 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 11 (2):221-236.

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References found in this work

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Thomas S. Kuhn - 1962 - Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Ian Hacking.
The Logic of Scientific Discovery.K. Popper - 1959 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 10 (37):55-57.
Genesis and development of a scientific fact.Ludwik Fleck - 1979 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edited by T. J. Trenn & R. K. Merton.
Discovery and explanation in biology and medicine.Kenneth F. Schaffner - 1993 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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