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The person-population paradox in clinical medicine
Ralph I Horwitz1, Allison Hayes Conroy1, Mark R Cullen2
1Temple University, Philadelphia, USA.
Abstract:
Modern medicine rejects mind-body dualism in theory yet reproduces it in practice by privileging biological variables while treating biography as noise. This disconnect fuels therapeutic heterogeneity and persistent disappointment in personalized medicine. We argue that biology and biography are co-constitutive and that resolving the resulting person-population paradox requires inverting medical epistemology. Rather than deriving generalizations from averaged populations, bottom-up knowledge should emerge from intensive individual mechanistic profiles, allowing recurrent bio-biographical patterns to guide prediction, treatment, and trial design.
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