Pregledni rad
BIOMEDICAL PARADIGMA OF HEALTH, ILLNESS AND MEDICINE AS A TOPICAL ISSUE
Živka Staničić
; Medicinski fakultet Sveučilišta u Splitu
Sažetak
In modern Western society there are many, most various concepts of medical treatment, health and illness, which include a huge scope of concepts, from those pre–logicala and magic up to the scientific. From this variety it can be falsely concluded that there are many conceptual multy–layers, which would imply that many paradigms of medical treatment, health and medicine co–exist, and that it is not possible for any of them to gain a dominant status.
This paper shows that such a theoretical pluralism is only a fiction. What we actually have is theoretical monism, which means that the “hard core” of the biomedical paradigm actually remains unchanged in spite of all elaborations and modifications.
It has also been shown that all paradigms declining from the biomedical are neutralized and marginalized by means of special strategies. All analytic and critical discourses against the biomedical paradigm aim at answering the following question: Why is the biomedical paradigm, in spite of its “incompatibility with facts”, still the most predominant paradigm in modern medicine? It has turned out that its monocausal interpretation is not satisfactory when we have to explain contemporary degenerative illnesses generated by man. Although the “dogmatic certainty” of the biomedical paradigm has recently been undermined, it has not yet been seriously put into question. This is so because the biomedical paradigm reproduces and legitimizes the political economy of developed societies.
Ključne riječi
biomedical paradigm; constitutive principles of biomedical paradigm; paradigm and scientific community; theoretical monism / pluralism
Hrčak ID:
139818
URI
Datum izdavanja:
15.5.2001.
Posjeta: 2.434 *