Nature of Medicine

The story of medicine is one of striving to make sense of the human experience of illness. Patients who perceive themselves to be ill have always asked questions of the doctor: ¹ ‘Am I indeed ill?’ ‘Can I be cured?’ ‘Can my suffering be relieved?’ ‘Why has this happened to me?’ ‘What will happen to me now?’ ‘Will I die?’ The enormous advances of scientific medicine over the last century have meant affirmative answers to the second question – ‘Can I be cured?’ – in more and more cases with much relief of suffering and prevention of premature death. However, this has been at the cost of avoiding the other questions and the human need is for all the questions to be answered. Medicine is diminished by too narrow a definition of the discipline, in terms both of the nature of illness and disease, and of their causes.