title: On the inadequacy of the concept of disease.
abstract: A framework for a critical examination of the disease concept is presented. The human organism is regarded as a complex system upon which certain hierarchies are imposed. The cell is regarded in this framework as the lowest hierarchy. Cells are aggregated into tissues and tissues into organs. Organs are assembled into organ systems constituting the human organism. The elementary indivisible unit in each hierarchy is called the HOLON. When viewed from the hierarchy below it encompasses a continuum. The holon is defined by its attributes. Its STATE represents the magnitudes of its attributes. The state of the organism is defined by the states of its holons. For each attribute a criterion level (or state) defines its ILLNESS STATE. ILLNESS is defined by the set of attributes crossing the criterion level. These attributes are divided into two two sets: Attributes requiring treatment by the physician and those not requiring intervention by him. The first is defined as DISEASE, while the second as the VIS MEDICATRIX NATURAE. THERAPY is the restoration of "ill" attributes below their criterion levels. The process of selecting the DISEASE attribute set from all organismic attributes is called DIAGNOSIS. The correctness of a diagnosis is testable by treatment results. A successful treatment corroborates the diagnosis and vice versa. Since an intractable disease is also untreatable, its diagnosis is not testable (or falsifiable) in Popper's sense. The framework provides also means to test the relevancy of cancer theories to human cancer.
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D003933:Diagnosis; D004194:Disease / Q000209:etiology*; D006801:Humans; D009374:Neoplasms, Experimental / Q000209:etiology; D010686:Philosophy, Medical; D013598:Systems Theory; D013812:Therapeutics