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In-Depth Information
3.6
Fuzzy Health, Patienthood, Illness and Diseases
Ever since the 1980's Sadegh-Zadeh discussed the nature of health, illness, mal-
ady, patienthood, and disease in medical sciences and philosophy and, and preco-
ciously combined his investigations with the theory of Fuzzy sets and systems. In
the “Goodbye”-article he asserted that “Medicine is a healing profession, however,
it is not a natural science discipline. It is concerned with health, illness, disease,
therapy, life, and death of the
patient
as a human being, i.e., with something that
is defined not by nature, but by human values, society, and culture.” Moreover, he
claimed that “medical thinking and practice has been concerned with this value-
laden and action-theoretical subject [...]
it has taken place in a methodological
vacuum until now.”
(a)
(b)
Fig. 3.13
(a): Headline of article [61]; (b) Headline of article [62]
Already in the introduction to the first part of his quadripartite article “Funda-
mentals of clinical methodology” ([61], Fig. 3.13 (a)) he referred to “medicine's
failure to recognize the need for, and to establish, a
Methodology of Clinical Prac-
tice
as a research and training branch. Medical students are not tought any algorithm
or logic for their clinical problem-solving. every physician is thus left alone to re-
discover the wheel of proficient practicing. And she carries it with herself into her
grave. This is the entire (hi)story of clinical thinking.” [61, p. 83]
In the “Goodbye”-article he declared expressly that “there is as yet no method-
ology in medicine” and he gave as a reason “the fact that medical language and
knowledge are inherently and irremediably vague and, therefore, not amenable to
traditional methodological approaches that rely on precisionism.” [69, p. 19] As an
example he quoted the following paragraph from a standard medical textbook [53,
p. 18.28]:
“In
adolescents
and
adult
s the onset is
sudden
and may come 'out of the
blue'; but
often
the patient has a
cold
or other upper respiratory infection
and
rapidly
becomes
much more ill
,
perhaps
with an initial
rigor
but al-
ways with a sharp rise in temperature, usually to 101
103
◦
F. Pleuritic
−
pain
usually
develops over the affected lobe.”
