[Biomedicine and quality of life: a theoretical analysis]

The notions of illness (subjective feeling), disease (technical labelling), and sickness (social evaluation) are used for highlighting the fact that they constitute semantic spaces which may not coincide. Several factors explain the predominance of biomedical thinking, which must be construed as a cultural system in order to permit an appraisal of its values and weaknesses in relation to other systems such as popular, and folk systems. Quality of life as a research area emphasizes the illness side of the health care system, and may be defined as a tension between expectations and results. It is pointed out that a sound health-care system should strive for a comprehensive multidimensionality integrating technical, personal, and social points of view.