title: Effectiveness of medical interventions.
abstract: To be effective, a medical intervention must improve one's health by targeting a disease. The concept of disease, though, is controversial. Among the leading accounts of disease-naturalism, normativism, hybridism, and eliminativism-I defend a version of hybridism. A hybrid account of disease holds that for a state to be a disease that state must both (i) have a constitutive causal basis and (ii) cause harm. The dual requirement of hybridism entails that a medical intervention, to be deemed effective, must target either the constitutive causal basis of a disease or the harms caused by the disease (or ideally both). This provides a theoretical underpinning to the two principle aims of medical treatment: care and cure.
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy, University of Victoria, Canada; University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Electronic address: stegenga@uvic.ca.
authors.forename: Jacob
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Stegenga
mesh_terms: D004194:Disease / Q000145:classification*; D006801:Humans; D010686:Philosophy, Medical; D011315:Preventive Medicine / Q000592:standards*
keywords: Disease; Effectiveness; Health; Hybridism