Redefining medicine from an anticipatory perspective

The meaning of the concept of anticipation escapes the majority of those concerned with change, in particular those who study health. To characterize only genetic disorders, such as conditions with progressively earlier symptoms and higher intensity of disease from generation to generation, in terms of anticipatory expression is rather limited and limiting. Practitioners of medical care could benefit from understanding anticipation as definitory of the living. This view explains why diminished anticipatory expression, in all forms of the living, results in conditions calling for medical attention. So far, medicine has opted for a deterministic-reductionist perspective that reduces the living to a machine. Medical care, stuck in the grey zone between success and failure, should overcome its reactive obsession. From an almost exclusively mechanistic activity, it should evolve into a holistic proactive practice of well-being that reflects awareness of anticipation.