UNSTRUCTURED What is ‘medicine’? To answer this question, published definitions or conceptualizations were sought through adapted search strategies of Google Scholar, Medline, Embase, and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews; Top-11 English dictionaries; and the websites of top-ranked medical schools, all 113 members of the World Medical Association, the US Institute of Medicine, the World Federation for Medical Education and the World Health Organization up to March 2020. Three articles in scholarly journals, all of the dictionaries and none of the medical schools, associations, or institutions provided a definition or conceptualization. No source described a systematic, replicable process to capture the meaning of ‘medicine’. Bold, systematic, and replicable initiatives are needed to fill this gap, as a means to guide the contributions of the medical profession, governments, academia, and corporations; to separate medicine from other professions, and to clarify its role in the creation and preservation of health beyond the chemical-mechanical view of patients and their diseases as humanity goes through the COVID-19 pandemic and enters ‘the next normal’.
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