Bridging Theory and Therapeutic Practice: From Generalized Disease Models to Particular Patients

Abstract

The traditional problem of the poor presentability as well as ­diagnostic and therapeutic practicability of individual patient care is still unresolved. Biomodulatory therapies for metastatic tumors bring transparency into tumor systems by breaking into a tumor’s holistic communicative world, and by dissecting the tumor for practical purposes, such as attenuation of tumor growth, in comprehensible evolutionary processes. Biomodulatory therapies show that the holistic communicative structures of a tumor are now an experimentally and therapeutically accessible entity: Communication within systems―which is self-content to some degree―works with the implicit understanding that (1) the validity and denotation of particular systems objects (proteins, cells etc.) is always context-dependent, (2) the validity and denotation of the systems objects may be therapeutically redeemed by systems-immanent communication rules, which are determined by descriptively accessible communicative systems textures including intersystemic exchange processes. The difference between theory and practice may be decisively attenuated (1) by giving reductionistically derived systems features an internal communicative context (formal-pragmatic communication theory), (2) by introducing a novel and scientifically accessible perspective, i.e. the tumor’s ‘living world’, which is defined as a tumor’s holistic communicative world, and (3) finally by binding the systems features to tumor-immanent evolutionary processes (modularity of biochemical and cellular processes, rationalization of tumor functions). The newly discovered tumor-associated systems architectures, which are built on the capability of tumor systems to modularly rearrange the validity and denotation of systems objects, clearly differ from the reductionistically derived systems comprehension: (1) Communicatively-derived systems structures offer new insights into evolutionary processes, promoting tumor development and expansion into the ‘metabolism’ of tumor evolution. (2) Based on the perception of a systems participator, we ultimately leave behind typical reductionistically derived teleological systems features. (3) Both, reductionist and holistic understanding are exerted to reproduce a situational stage of tumor disease: Differential perspectives of therapeutic interaction are entangled with various levels of knowledge and consecutively with different therapy strategies.