On medicine as a human science

All the powerful influences exerted by the subjective-interpersonal dimension on the organic or technical-functional dimension of sickness and health do not make an intersubjective test concerning medical therapeutic results impossible. These influences are not arbitrary; on the contrary, they obey "laws" that are de facto sufficiently stable to allow predictions and explanations similar to those of experimental sciences. While, in this respect, the rules concerning human action are analogous to the scientific laws of nature, they can at any time be revoked by becoming aware of them. Law-like and reproducible regularities in the sciences of man are by no means separated from a patient's personal-hermeneutic mediation. This makes it possible for human beings to modify, improve or sometimes even entirely (or better almost entirely) suspend these psychological, sociological, ethnological, medical, regularities. For this reason the sciences of man including medicine are under the obligation of constantly inspecting the continuing validity of the rules on which their predictions and explanations are based, namely by indirect, statistical methods. This requires a synergistic collaboration of extra-clinical and clinical tests through which medicine can obtain a good level of intersubjective testability.