ABSTRACT
The world of modern medicine is shaped by positivism and revered as a place of reason, a world in which mathematical calculation and "objectivity" are prized all else. People are privileged to be living in a period of transition, from modernity based on positivism to postmodernity which rejects ultimate truths and objectivity in the narrow sense. Modern, evidence-based medicine is thus structured on the basis of numbers and founded on the belief that numbers, in particular statistically significant calculations, bestow objectivity and truth. While evidence-based medicine is indebted to modern positivism, human-based medicine's foundations are based in the maxims of postmodernism. Human-based medicine is indebted to postmodern maxims. The postmodern becomes a reaction against a naïve belief in progress and the scientific truth of a positivistic modernity and rejects conventional realism and fundamentalism. Postmodernism encompasses widely divergent positions that leave plenty of room for irony.'
