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(a)
(b)
Fig. 3.14
(a): Headline of article [63]; (b) Headline of article [65]
Sadegh-Zadeh argued that this passage, an archetypical example of medical text, is
“replete with vague, natural language terms”. We emphasized these words in ital-
ics in the quote above. Once again he characterized medicine as “an inexact field,
because, first, the language and knowledge of the subjects constituting this field,
i.e. the health care personnel and the patient, are inexact and uncertain, and second,
their goals and decisions based upon that language and knowledge are imprecise
and uncertain as well.” [69, p. 19] He arrived to the conclusion that a denotation of
a medical term is a class of any objects or processes that we can “reconstruct and
treat as a fuzzy set. It will thus be correct and advantageous to postulate that
Everything in medicine is fuzzy.
rendering the entire medicine an application domain of fuzzy theory.” [69, p. 19]
In “Fuzzy Health, Illness, and Disease” ([66], Fig. 3.15), published in 2000,
Sadegh-Zadeh claimed that the concepts “health”, “illness”, and “disease” “are not
amenable to classical logic” and he rejected the conceptual opposition that an indi-
vidual could simply be either healthy or ill. [66] Eight years later, in “The Prototype
Resemblance Theory of Disease” ([70], Fig. 3.13) he clarified his position that “this
traditional view is a semantic naivety.” He argued “that the opposite of health, that
is 'unhealth', is not disease but
malady
. Malady is a broader category than dis-
ease. It comprises, besides disease as one of its subcategories, also many others
such as injury, wound, lesion, defect, deformity, disorder, disability, and the like.
An individual need not necessarily have a disease to lack health. [...] Based on
these considerations, we may metalinguistically state that the antonym of the term
'health' is the term 'malady' and not the term 'disease'. Every disease is a malady,
but not vice versa.” [70, p. 107]
Early in the 1980s he created a fuzzy theoretic approach toward a novel theoret-
ical framework of these concepts: “health is a matter of degree, illness is a matter
of degree, and disease is a matter of degree” [60]. He introduced the concept of
pa-
tienthood
that means “being afflicted by a malady” [60] in the discussion “of which
the notion of
health
will be the additive inverse in the following sense:
Health = 1
−
patienthood.”
