The Categories of Health and Disease in Evolution of Paradigms of Medicine

Abstract

The article presents results of analysis of concepts “health” and “disease” to identify patterns of changes in their meaning and content which resulted into increasing of technologization of modern medicine. Every of considered ways of interpreting concept of “disease” contains certain image of human and one's attitude to internal (natural) and external (natural, social) environment and determines the degree of necessity, direction and character of impact on human body. The modifications of ways these categories are interpreted reflect evolutionary transition of successive changes in three paradigms of medicine: biocentric - sociocentric - technocentric. There is no clear demarcation between pathological and normal states of organism in the biocentric paradigm. The medical standard is identical to biological one; its criterion is viability. In the sociocentric paradigm, social factors of human activity dominate natural ones. The concept of “disease” acquires negative meaning and begins to be defined as “failure”, violation of adaptation of human organism. The natural consequence of this approach is increasing of spectrum and intensity of medical intervention: medical technologies begin to be applied to eliminate biologically normal conditions of patient's body. The main feature of technocentric paradigm is its constructivist character: biomedicine seeks to create new states of human body and psyche that do not exist in the nature. Understanding health as “well-being” leads to relativity of medical standards that becomes depended on constantly changing individual standards.