Mereological Critique of Statistical Medicine
Christy Ailman, Philosophy, Teaching Assistant, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Medical practices today conceptualize disease as ideal forms and tend to neglect individual aberrations. I contend that this is not the most accurate way to approach diagnosis. Within the field of logic, it is taken for granted that if two entities occur together that their simultaneous occurrence is the same as the entities occurring separately. I argue that it is wrong to make such an assumption. I find that the distinction between a simultaneous occurrence of two entities, and the entities occurring separately is made explicit when applied to the field of medicine, and from this distinction I argue personalize medicine ought to be the normative standard for medical practices. As Bishop illustrates in The Anticipatory Corpse, there is no platonic form of any given disease. We learn the “textbook form” of a disease through individual experiences of similar medical cases. Taken together, these cases provide us with an understanding of a disease. Now, there may in fact be commonalities between all the cases; but nevertheless, for every patient there is a unique anatomical structure, foreign environment, and genealogical composition. As a result, for any given disease, there will be unique reactions within a patient to the disease x. It is not enough to know the statistically relevant causes and treatments of disease x; due to the uniqueness of any given patient, the treatment for disease x ought to be unique to the patient. Thus I argue alongside Bishop, that the currently reigning paradigm of statistical medicine misconstrues the true reality of disease. Personalized medicine, a paradigm which takes into account the unique contextual circumstances of each patient, comes much closer to capturing the true reality of disease, and consequently the normative reality of disease treatment. Religion of the patient must be taken into account within the paradigm of personalized medicine, since beliefs translate into psychological reaction, outcomes, and even treatment approaches.
Medical practices today conceptualize disease as ideal forms and tend to neglect individual aberrations. I contend that this is not the most accurate way to approach diagnosis. Within the field of logic, it is taken for granted that if two entities occur together that their simultaneous occurrence is the same as the entities occurring separately. I argue that it is wrong to make such an assumption. I find that the distinction between a simultaneous occurrence of two entities, and the entities occurring separately is made explicit when applied to the field of medicine, and from this distinction I argue personalize medicine ought to be the normative standard for medical practices. As Bishop illustrates in The Anticipatory Corpse, there is no platonic form of any given disease. We learn the “textbook form” of a disease through individual experiences of similar medical cases. Taken together, these cases provide us with an understanding of a disease. Now, there may in fact be commonalities between all the cases; but nevertheless, for every patient there is a unique anatomical structure, foreign environment, and genealogical composition. As a result, for any given disease, there will be unique reactions within a patient to the disease x. It is not enough to know the statistically relevant causes and treatments of disease x; due to the uniqueness of any given patient, the treatment for disease x ought to be unique to the patient. Thus I argue alongside Bishop, that the currently reigning paradigm of statistical medicine misconstrues the true reality of disease. Personalized medicine, a paradigm which takes into account the unique contextual circumstances of each patient, comes much closer to capturing the true reality of disease, and consequently the normative reality of disease treatment. Religion of the patient must be taken into account within the paradigm of personalized medicine, since beliefs translate into psychological reaction, outcomes, and even treatment approaches.