title: [Considerations on the nature and dynamics of medical practice].
abstract: Those criteria of analysis are rejected which attribute changes in medical practice to deviations from ethical orientation. Instead, objective criteria are proposed that take into account both the internal and external factors in medical practice. "Medical knowledge" - an organized body of general and abstract knowledge acquired through the study of disciplines whose subject matter represents only a small part of the real world and isolated from their application to the general and concrete object which is man - is one of the two elements that come to the fore as a criterion of analysis. The second is the user of medical practice - the healthy or sick person, who in each case represents a global reality different from the sum of generic abstractions that may have been formulated about him, thus constituting a particular being who is both the agent and the product of his personal and social history. Between the regular features of the biological level and the special features of the humanistic level there is a contradiction, since the professional has at his disposal more and more partial knowledge about the object of medical practice and fewer and fewer references about its totality. This leads him to transfer the object of his practice from the individual to the disease, to reduce the reality of the person to so many categories of abstractions, to transform the concrete patient into an "abstract" one, who may go from being a "victim" to a "defendant" once the "atypical" somatic characteristics derived from his personal and social adjustment become manifest.
mesh_terms: D004992:Ethics, Medical; D011364:Professional Practice
vernacular_title: Considerações sobre a natureza e a dinămica da prática médica