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Ole Isacson: Development of New Therapies for Parkinson's Disease
Published on: April 29, 2007
How to make real, constructive, progress in medicine
1Department of Medicine, Center for Bioethics, Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, NY 10032, USA. js1115@columbia.edu
Rationale:
One's understanding of medical progress - what it is, how it is pursued and how it is assessed - may be deeply dependent on one's understanding of the metaphysics of medicine, and of diseases in particular.
Aims And Objectives:
In this paper I present a new account of the nature of diseases, neither realist nor constructivist, and describe what progress in medicine looks like if we understand diseases in this way.
Conclusions:
This new account, Constructive Realism, may provide a better account of medicine than either realism or constructivism.
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