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Harm and the concept of medical disorder.

Theoretical medicine and bioethics·2017
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Medical disorder, harm, and damage.

Neil Feit1

  • 1Department of Philosophy, State University of New York at Fredonia, Fredonia, NY, 14063, USA. neil.feit@fredonia.edu.

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics
|February 6, 2020
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Jerome Wakefield's harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA) for medical disorders is critiqued for its criteria. Revisions to the HDA by David G. Limbaugh also fail to improve its attractiveness for defining disorders.

Keywords:
DiseaseDisorderExtrinsic valueHarmIntrinsic valueMedical disorderPhilosophy of medicineValueWell-being

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Area of Science:

  • Philosophy of Medicine
  • Medical Ethics
  • Philosophy of Science

Background:

  • Jerome Wakefield's harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA) is a prominent theory defining medical disorders.
  • The HDA requires a failure of natural function and resulting harm to classify a condition as a disorder.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To critically assess David G. Limbaugh's modifications to the HDA.
  • To evaluate whether Limbaugh's revisions enhance the HDA's explanatory power and plausibility.

Main Methods:

  • Review of the original harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA).
  • Critical analysis of David G. Limbaugh's revised harm criterion within the HDA framework.
  • Argumentation based on philosophical reasoning and conceptual analysis.

Main Results:

  • The original HDA, and similar theories using a harm criterion, face significant challenges regarding disorder individuation and judgment.
  • Limbaugh's modifications to the HDA's harm criterion do not resolve the fundamental issues identified with the original theory.
  • The revised HDA remains unattractive due to persistent conceptual difficulties.

Conclusions:

  • The harmful dysfunction analysis, even with modifications, struggles to provide a satisfactory definition of medical disorder.
  • Further theoretical development is needed to adequately define medical disorders, moving beyond the current HDA framework.