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SUMMARY:Prediction and medicine - Alex Broadbent (University of Johannesbu
 rg)
DTSTART:20160302T130000Z
DTEND:20160302T143000Z
UID:TALK63656@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:31287
DESCRIPTION:Historian of medicine Roy Porter maintains that the position o
 f medicine in society has had\, and still has\, little to do with its abil
 ity to make people better. There is a line of thinking in both history and
  philosophy of medicine that we might call medical nihilism (following Jac
 ob Stegenga). This view holds that medicine is not what it is cracked up t
 o be. But this view assumes (unlike Porter) that the purpose of medicine i
 s indeed to cure people. In this paper I argue that the core medical compe
 tence is not to cure\, nor to prevent\, but to predict disease. The predic
 tions expected of doctors are both actual and counterfactual: both 'When w
 ill I get better?' and 'What would have happened if I had not taken my med
 icine?'. This 'predictive thesis' does a better job than the 'curative the
 sis' at explaining why not all medicine is concerned with curative efforts
 \, and it enjoys considerable historical support from the ancient entangle
 ment of prophesy and medicine and from the fact that medicine thrived for 
 centuries with almost no effective cures\, and continues to thrive today i
 n various non-Western and complimentary forms that are mostly without cura
 tive efficacy. I also argue that it relieves medicine of the pretences of 
 potency that generate the anger implicit in the arguments for medical nihi
 lism. This view also affects expectations of epidemiology\, which is somet
 imes criticised for cataloguing predictive risk factors whose causal relat
 ion to the outcome is unclear\, instead of identifying decisive interventi
 ons. Finally I ask whether this descriptive thesis about the nature of med
 icine offers any normative lessons for the development of medicine.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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