title: The challenge to biomedicine: a foundations perspective.
abstract: The basic premise of today's scientific medicine is that the 'book of man' is written in the language of the biological sciences, ultimately molecular genetics and biochemistry. The patient is a complex biological organism and disease is a deviation from the norm of somatic parameters. At the same time, many major contemporary diseases are reported to have psychosocial and environmental components in their etiology. Hence the challenge: how can a medical model be both scientific and conceptually well-suited to today's disease burden? I argue that certain contemporary "postmodern" sciences support alternative, non-reductionist (self-organizational) premises. So doing, they offer an infrastructure for a medical model at once scientific and responsive to the diseases at hand.
authors: L
authors: L
authors: Foss
mesh_terms: D000529:Complementary Therapies; D004501:Education, Medical; D006694:Holistic Health; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D010686:Philosophy, Medical; D013561:Symbolism