The concept of disease: its evolution in medical students

First, third and fifth year medical students were asked to say to what extent they considered each of 38 conditions to be a disease, to be treatable, to be serious, to be the fault of the patient and to be external in cause. Fifth year students were significantly more inclusive in their use of the term disease, applying it to far more conditions, with third year students midway between the first and fifth year students. The use of the term disease did not relate to any great extent with its treatability, seriousness, blame or externality. The concept of disease, despite the difficulty of a consistent, formal philosophical definition, is heuristically useful, and is applied readily by medical students, evolving as students progress through medical school, in a way that cannot be explained in relation to other perceptions of the conditions.