On values, professionalism and nosology: an essay with late commentary on essays by DeVito and Rudnick.
The essays by Scott DeVito and Abraham Rudnick are on largely the same topics--the meanings of healthy(y), normal, disease, pathological, diagnosis, etc., and they contain compatible conclusions--that medical precepts are value-laden and less objective than some naive model of scientific objectivity would suggest. This commentary opens with a brief critique of each and ends with a more in-depth account, one complaint being how lacking in weight the analyses are. In the middle portion of this commentary, I consider the sorts of values that are present in some case studies--values that give the project much more weight. These include the values, scientific and self-serving, that professionalism provides. I show how medicine and its disease-related concepts can be thought to evolve in many ways.
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Department of Family Medicine, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-SOM, Stratford, 08084-1350, USA.
D015510:Clinical Medicine; D004194:Disease; D004995:Ethics, Professional; D006262:Health; D006801:Humans; D010686:Philosophy, Medical; D012945:Social Values