Is Medicine Losing its Way? A Firm Foundation for Medicine as a Real Therapeia

Abstract

Is medicine losing its way? This question may seem to imply a serious warning, one needing a further explanation. What I mean to say by the title of this paper is that we can detect an undeniable shift in medicine in the last forty to fifty years. Medicine used to focus on what we call “health care” in a classical sense, that is, the treatment of people suffering from diseases, injuries or handicaps, or the alleviation of pain and other symptoms. In addition to this, in the last half century, it has begun to offer more and more treatments aiming to perfect the qualities of people who are otherwise healthy.

Summary

Due to the rapid progress of research in the biomedical field, medicine is already and will ever more be able not only to cure diseases, but also to improve the characteristics of healthy human persons. This seems to be justifiable from the point of view of the contemporary view of man. This considers the mind as the actual human person and the body as an object of which he may dispose as he likes. However, serious and convincing objections exist against this view, because it does not do justice to the fact that we experience ourselves as a unity. Aristotelian-Thomist anthropology explains man as a substantial unity of a spiritual and a material dimension, of body and soul, which implies that the body is an essential dimension of man, participates in his intrinsic dignity and is never to be instrumentalized in order to improve the characteristics of healthy people. Medicine should apply all new medical techniques availed, but remain true health care.