Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
7.1.2
Reducing the Fact of Being Individual to Some Measurable
Variables: The Problem of Misdiagnosis in Medicine
On the other side, there could be a correlation between this usual way of starting
situation and relationship between the patient and the physician and the huge rate of
misdiagnosis, just because of the distance to the very own feelings, that involves a
reduced body awareness in return to the self-objectivation of the person as a patient.
The problem is, as Sadegh-Zadegh points to from the very beginning of his book:
“There are still so many wrong diagnoses [about 38% misdiagnoses] and treatments,
pains and physician-caused deaths. Why and how do they arise?”
He raises concern over the “surprising and even disturbing”
5
experience, that
there are more often different diagnosis to one and the same illness of a patient,
quiet a lot of differences between the views and judgments of medical experts faced
with the individual case of disease. This problem cannot be solved from the physi-
cian's perspective alone, because his acting and observing depends on the individual
patient and has to take care of her particular and most concrete, personally unique
and singularly situation. The solution might not only be found in improving meth-
ods and measurement tools for diagnostics, but in changing the physician's attitude
and perspective on the situation and patient.
The idea, that the huge number of misdiagnosis in medicine can decrease, if
the physicians improve their methods and machines in diagnostics (e.g. with fuzzy
sets theory), is based on a certain image of the physician as a repairing or healing
expert dealing with the patients disease or physiology. But the relationship between
physician and patient is always an intersubjective interplay between two individual
persons, not a one-sided relationship between a technical expert and his object.
To be an individual means not only to be confronted at any time with a unique and
singularly situation, but to be characterized as a “unique and singularly being”
6
,so
the philosopher Martin Heidegger figures out as a formal definition of human beings
existing in Time.
7
5
[5], Preface, p. 2.
6
[3], p. 29 ff: “jeweiliges und jemeiniges Dasein” (translated by K. H.)
7
This fundamental description of a person's structure of being and existing in Time can be
understood in analogy to the physical description of an atomic particle (and his movement)
in quantum mechanics. Any particle is assigned and can be defined by its position
x
and its
momentum
p
at a certain time. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle between the position
and the momentum (mass times velocity) of particles, such as an electron, means that the
more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in
this instant, and vice versa. The uncertainty principle is any of a variety of mathematical
inequalities asserting a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of phys-
ical properties of a particle, such as position
x
and momentum
p
, can be simultaneously
known. This relation has profound implications for such fundamental notions as causal-
ity and the determination of the future behavior of a particle. Thus it can be called more
descriptively the “principle of indeterminacy.” To transfer this to the better understanding
of individuals being unique in time and (inter)acting singularly in new situations, makes
clear why it will be necessary to apply fuzzy set methods to life science and medicine.
That would mean to accept vagueness not as a deficit but as a leading principle for dealing
and interacting with person, at last because it is constitutive (ontologically essential) for
the notion of freedom and autonomy human rights are mainly related to.
