Understanding Health By Building Better Bio-Medical Models

Abstract

Current medical thinking is the product of many years of intellectual evolution with influences coming from a number of different sources. As noted earlier (Chap.1), medicine has passed through stages comparable with the theological and metaphysical (or abstract) stages proposed by Comte. Now, medicine very much exists within a scientific (or positive) framework. In passing through different phases in its development, medicine has been subject to different modes of thinking. These have coloured the explanations and descriptions of what was being experienced by suffering individuals. Keating and Cambrosio [1] have proposed that such ways of thinking—that is, medical models—play a key part in all clinical thinking. They go so far as to suggest that ‘… the object of medicine is not the bodyper sebut, rather, models of the body’ [1]. The human body is not necessarily seen as it really is but rather as it appears in terms of the conceptual models that have emerged over time. As a consequence, these models form intellectual frameworks within which one’s professional duties are conducted. It is not necessarily the case that the models by which many work are being deliberately or explicitly followed. Rather, a mental image or impression builds up tacitly over time as a result of a number of different influences. It is important to continually strive for the development of the best models possible and not to rely upon some traditional way of thinking merely because it appears to work.