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  1. (1 other version)The concept of disease—vague, complex, or just indefinable?Bjørn Hofmann - 2010 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 13 (1):3-10.
    The long ongoing and partly heated debate on the concept of disease has not led to any consensus on the status of this apparently essential concept for modern health care. The arguments range from claims that the disease concept is vague, slippery, elusive, or complex, and to statements that the concept is indefinable and unnecessary. The unsettled status of the concept of disease is challenging not only to health care where diagnosing, treating, and curing disease are core aims, but also (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Toward a Theory of Medical Fallibility.S. Gorovitz & A. MacIntyre - 1976 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 1 (1):51-71.
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  • The Paradox of Health Care.Bjørn Hofmann - 2001 - Health Care Analysis 9 (4):369-386.
    The term "paradox'' signifies a contradiction of some sort. Modern health care appears to be rich in contradictions, and it is claimed to be paradoxical in a number of ways.In particular health care is held to be a paradox itself: it is supposed to do good, but is accused of doing harm. The objective of this article is to investigate whether the concept of paradox can serve as a framework for analysing pressing problems in modern healthcare. To pursue this, three (...)
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  • Decision Making Under Great Uncertainty.Sven Ove Hansson - 1996 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 26 (3):369-386.
    This article is an attempt at a systematic account of decision making under greater uncertainty than what traditional, mathematically oriented decision theory can cope with. Four components of great uncertainty are distinguished: (1) the identity of the options is not well determined (uncertainty of demarcation) ; (2) the consequences of at least some option are unknown (uncertainty of consequences); (3) it is not clear whether information obtained from others, such as experts, can be relied on (uncertainty of reliance); and (4) (...)
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  • Fuzzy health, illness, and disease.Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh - 2000 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 25 (5):605 – 638.
    The notions of health, illness, and disease are fuzzy-theoretically analyzed. They present themselves as non-Aristotelian concepts violating basic principles of classical logic. A recursive scheme for defining the controversial notion of disease is proposed that also supports a concept of fuzzy disease. A sketch is given of the prototype resemblance theory of disease.
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  • (1 other version)Medicine as science. Systematicity and demarcation.Somogy Varga - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):3783-3804.
    While medicine is solidly grounded on scientific areas such as biology and chemistry, some argue that it is in its essence not a science at all. With medicine playing a substantial societal role, addressing questions about the scientific nature of medicine is of obvious urgency. This paper takes on such a task and starts by consulting the literature on the “demarcation” problem in the philosophy of science. Learning from failures of earlier approaches, it proposes that we adopt a Deflated Approach, (...)
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  • Beneficence, Interests, and Wellbeing in Medicine: What It Means to Provide Benefit to Patients.Johan Christiaan Bester - 2020 - American Journal of Bioethics 20 (3):53-62.
    Beneficence is a foundational ethical principle in medicine. To provide benefit to a patient is to promote and protect the patient’s wellbeing, to promote the patient’s interests. But there are different conceptions of wellbeing, emphasizing different values. These conceptions of wellbeing are contrary to one another and give rise to dissimilar ideas of what it means to benefit a patient. This makes the concept of beneficence ambiguous: is a benefit related to the patient’s goals and wishes, or is it a (...)
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  • Progress in Defining Disease: Improved Approaches and Increased Impact.Peter H. Schwartz - 2017 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 42 (4):485-502.
    In a series of recent papers, I have made three arguments about how to define “disease” and evaluate and apply possible definitions. First, I have argued that definitions should not be seen as traditional conceptual analyses, but instead as proposals about how to define and use the term “disease” in the future. Second, I have pointed out and attempted to address a challenge for dysfunction-requiring accounts of disease that I call the “line-drawing” problem: distinguishing between low-normal functioning and dysfunctioning. Finally, (...)
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  • Vagueness and Contradiction.Roy Sorensen - 2005 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (3):695-703.
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  • Vagueness in Psychiatry: An Overview.Geert Keil, Lara Keuck & Rico Hauswald - 2016 - In Geert Keil, Lara Keuck & Rico Hauswald (eds.), Vagueness in Psychiatry. Oxford: Oxford University Press UK. pp. 3-23.
    In psychiatry there is no sharp boundary between the normal and the pathological. Although clear cases abound, it is often indeterminate whether a particular condition does or does not qualify as a mental disorder. For example, definitions of ‘subthreshold disorders’ and of the ‘prodromal stages’ of diseases are notoriously contentious. Philosophers and linguists call concepts that lack sharp boundaries, and thus admit of borderline cases, ‘vague’. This overview chapter reviews current debates about demarcation in psychiatry against the backdrop of key (...)
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  • Vagueness.Timothy Williamson - 1994 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (4):589-601.
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  • (1 other version)Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.Bernard Williams - 1985 - Ethics 97 (4):821-833.
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  • Disorder as harmful dysfunction: A conceptual critique of DSM-III-R's definition of mental disorder.Jerome C. Wakefield - 1992 - Psychological Review 99 (2):232-247.
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  • Inductive Risk, Epistemic Risk, and Overdiagnosis of Disease.Justin B. Biddle - 2016 - Perspectives on Science 24 (2):192-205.
    . Recent philosophers of science have not only revived the classical argument from inductive risk but extended it. I argue that some of the purported extensions do not fit cleanly within the schema of the original argument, and I discuss the problem of overdiagnosis of disease due to expanded disease definitions in order to show that there are some risks in the research process that are important and that very clearly fall outside of the domain of inductive risk. Finally, I (...)
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  • Defining disease: Much ado about nothing?Jennifer Worrall & John Worrall - 2001 - In Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka & Evandro Agazzi (eds.), Life interpretation and the sense of illness within the human condition. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 33--55.
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  • On how to define the concept of health: A loose comparative approach.Bengt Brülde - 2000 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 3 (3):303-306.
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  • The importance of knowing how to talk about illness without applying the concept of illness.Halvor Nordby - 2004 - Nursing Philosophy 5 (1):30-40.
    The paper explores consequences of applying the view that illness is negative first‐person experience in caring practice. The main reason this is an important issue is that it is empirically documented that patients conceive of illness in different ways. Communicating about illness in caring practice can therefore involve difficulties. I argue that many of these difficulties can be avoided if nurses focus directly on the extension of the concept of illness – patients’ experiences like the state of being in pain (...)
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  • Defining 'health' and 'disease'.Marc Ereshefsky - 2009 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 40 (3):221-227.
    How should we define ‘health’ and ‘disease’? There are three main positions in the literature. Naturalists desire value-free definitions based on scientific theories. Normativists believe that our uses of ‘health’ and ‘disease’ reflect value judgments. Hybrid theorists offer definitions containing both normativist and naturalist elements. This paper discusses the problems with these views and offers an alternative approach to the debate over ‘health’ and ‘disease’. Instead of trying to find the correct definitions of ‘health’ and ‘disease’ we should explicitly talk (...)
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  • (1 other version)Toward metamedicine.Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh - 1980 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 1 (1):3-10.
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  • (1 other version)Complexity of the concept of disease as shown through rival theoretical frameworks.Bjørn Hofmann - 2001 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 22 (3):211-236.
    The concept of disease has been the subject ofa vast, vivid and versatile debate. Categoriessuch as ``realist'', ``nominalist'', ``ontologist'',``physiologist'', ``normativist'' and``descriptivist'' have been applied to classifydisease concepts. These categories refer tounderlying theoretical frameworks of thedebate. The objective of this review is toanalyse these frameworks. It is argued that thecategories applied in the debate refer toprofound philosophical issues, and that thecomplexity of the debate reflects thecomplexity of the concept itself: disease is acomplex concept, and does not easily lenditself to definition.
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  • The Line-drawing Problem in Disease Definition.Wendy A. Rogers & Mary Jean Walker - 2017 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 42 (4):405-423.
    Biological dysfunction is regarded, in many accounts, as necessary and perhaps sufficient for disease. But although disease is conceptualized as all-or-nothing, biological functions often differ by degree. A tension is created by attempting to use a continuous variable as the basis for a categorical definition, raising questions about how we are to pinpoint the boundary between health and disease. This is the line-drawing problem. In this paper, we show how the line-drawing problem arises within “dysfunction-requiring” accounts of disease, such as (...)
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  • Reasoning about Uncertainty.Joseph Y. Halpern - 2004 - Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 10 (3):427-429.
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  • Obesity as a Socially Defined Disease: Philosophical Considerations and Implications for Policy and Care.Bjørn Hofmann - 2016 - Health Care Analysis 24 (1):86-100.
    Obesity has generated significant worries amongst health policy makers and has obtained increased attention in health care. Obesity is unanimously defined as a disease in the health care and health policy literature. However, there are pragmatic and not principled reasons for this. This warrants an analysis of obesity according to standard conceptions of disease in the literature of philosophy of medicine. According to theories and definitions of disease referring to internal processes, obesity is not a disease. Obesity undoubtedly can result (...)
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  • Typicality, Graded Membership, and Vagueness.James A. Hampton - 2007 - Cognitive Science 31 (3):355-384.
    This paper addresses theoretical problems arising from the vagueness of language terms, and intuitions of the vagueness of the concepts to which they refer. It is argued that the central intuitions of prototype theory are sufficient to account for both typicality phenomena and psychological intuitions about degrees of membership in vaguely defined classes. The first section explains the importance of the relation between degrees of membership and typicality (or goodness of example) in conceptual categorization. The second and third section address (...)
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  • (1 other version)Handbook of Analytic Philosophy of Medicine.Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh - 2011 - Dordrecht, Heidelberg, New York, London: Springer.
    Medical practice is practiced morality, and clinical research belongs to normative ethics. The present book elucidates and advances this thesis by: 1. analyzing the structure of medical language, knowledge, and theories; 2. inquiring into the foundations of the clinical encounter; 3. introducing the logic and methodology of clinical decision-making, including artificial intelligence in medicine; 4. suggesting comprehensive theories of organism, life, and psyche; of health, illness, and disease; of etiology, diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, and therapy; and 5. investigating the moral and (...)
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  • On the triad disease, illness and sickness.Bjørn Hofmann - 2002 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 27 (6):651 – 673.
    The point of departure for this article is a review of the discussion between Twaddle and Nordenfelt on the concepts of disease, illness, and sickness, and the objective is to investigate the fruitfulness of these concepts. It is argued that disease, illness, and sickness represent different perspectives on human ailment and that they can be applied to analyze both epistemic and normative challenges to modern medicine. In particular the analysis reveals epistemic and normative differences between the concepts. Furthermore, the article (...)
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  • Illness: Mental and Otherwise.Peter Sedgwick - 1973 - The Hastings Center Studies 1 (3):19.
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  • (1 other version)Medicine as science. Systematicity and demarcation.Somogy Varga - 2020 - Synthese 22:1-22.
    While medicine is solidly grounded on scientific areas such as biology and chemistry, some argue that it is in its essence not a science at all. With medicine playing a substantial societal role, addressing questions about the scientific nature of medicine is of obvious urgency. This paper takes on such a task and starts by consulting the literature on the “demarcation” problem in the philosophy of science. Learning from failures of earlier approaches, it proposes that we adopt a Deflated Approach, (...)
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  • The new holism: P4 systems medicine and the medicalization of health and life itself.Henrik Vogt, Bjørn Hofmann & Linn Getz - 2016 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 19 (2):307-323.
    The emerging concept of systems medicine (or ‘P4 medicine’—predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory) is at the vanguard of the post-genomic movement towards ‘precision medicine’. It is the medical application of systems biology, the biological study of wholes. Of particular interest, P4 systems medicine is currently promised as a revolutionary new biomedical approach that is holistic rather than reductionist. This article analyzes its concept of holism, both with regard to methods and conceptualization of health and disease. Rather than representing a medical (...)
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  • Bias and values in scientific research.Torsten Wilholt - 2009 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 40 (1):92-101.
    When interests and preferences of researchers or their sponsors cause bias in experimental design, data interpretation or dissemination of research results, we normally think of it as an epistemic shortcoming. But as a result of the debate on science and values, the idea that all extra-scientific influences on research could be singled out and separated from pure science is now widely believed to be an illusion. I argue that nonetheless, there are cases in which research is rightfully regarded as epistemologically (...)
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  • (1 other version)Toward metamedicine.Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh - 1980 - Metamedicine 1 (1):3-10.
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  • Varieties of vagueness.Trenton Merricks - 2001 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (1):145-157.
    According to one account, vagueness is "metaphysical." The friend of metaphysical vagueness believes that, for some object and some property, there can be no determinate fact of the matter whether that object exemplifies that property. A second account maintains that vagueness is due only to ignorance. According to the epistemic account, vagueness is explained completely by and is nothing over and above our not knowing some relevant fact or facts. These are the minority views. The dominant position maintains that there (...)
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  • (1 other version)Simplified models of the relationship between health and disease.Bjørn Hofmann - 2005 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 26 (5):355-377.
    The concepts of health and disease are crucial in defining the aim and the limits of modern medicine. Accordingly it is important to understand them and their relationship. However, there appears to be a discrepancy between scholars in philosophy of medicine and health care professionals with regard to these concepts. This article investigates health care professionals’ concepts of health and disease and the relationship between them. In order to do so, four different models are described and analyzed: the ideal model, (...)
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  • ‘Vague’ at Higher Orders.Ivan Hu - 2017 - Mind 126 (504):1189-1216.
    Sorensen has argued that one can exploit the vagueness of an ordinary predicate like ‘small’ to induce a sort of vagueness in ‘vague’, by constructing a series of predicates of the form ‘n-small’, where x is n- small if and only if x is small or x n. The resulting ‘Sorensen’ed’ predicates present a Sorites case for ‘vague’ ; hence the vagueness of ‘vague’. Hyde argues that this demonstrates that all vague predicates are higher-order vague. Others doubt whether Sorensen’s series (...)
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  • (1 other version)Philosophy of Language and Mind: 1950-1990.Tyler Burge - 1992 - Philosophical Review 101 (1):3.
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  • (1 other version)Philosophy of Medicine.Alex Broadbent & Jonathan Fuller - 2020 - Philosophy of Medicine 1 (1).
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  • (1 other version)Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.Bernard Williams - 1987 - Behaviorism 15 (2):179-181.
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  • (1 other version)Vagueness. An exercise in logical analysis.Max Black - 1937 - Philosophy of Science 4 (4):427-455.
    It is a paradox, whose importance familiarity fails to diminish, that the most highly developed and useful scientific theories are ostensibly expressed in terms of objects never encountered in experience. The line traced by a draughtsman, no matter how accurate, is seen beneath the microscope as a kind of corrugated trench, far removed from the ideal line of pure geometry. And the “point-planet” of astronomy, the “perfect gas” of thermodynamics, or the “pure species” of genetics are equally remote from exact (...)
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  • Current Dilemmas in Defining the Boundaries of Disease.Jenny Doust, Mary Jean Walker & Wendy A. Rogers - 2017 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 42 (4):350-366.
    Boorse’s biostatistical theory states that diseases should be defined in ways that reflect disturbances of biological function and that are objective and value free. We use three examples from contemporary medicine that demonstrate the complex issues that arise when defining the boundaries of disease: polycystic ovary syndrome, chronic kidney disease, and myocardial infarction. We argue that the biostatistical theory fails to provide sufficient guidance on where the boundaries of disease should be drawn, contains ambiguities relating to choice of reference class, (...)
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  • Harm and the Boundaries of Disease.Patrick McGivern & Sarah Sorial - 2017 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 42 (4):467-484.
    What is the relationship between harm and disease? Discussions of the relationship between harm and disease typically suffer from two shortcomings. First, they offer relatively little analysis of the concept of harm itself, focusing instead on examples of clear cases of harm such as death and dismemberment. This makes it difficult to evaluate such accounts in borderline cases, where the putative harms are less severe. Second, they assume that harm-based accounts of disease must be understood normatively rather than naturalistically, in (...)
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  • The Semantics and Pragmatics of Medical Knowledge.Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh - 2011 - In Handbook of Analytic Philosophy of Medicine. Dordrecht, Heidelberg, New York, London: Springer.
    At least as important as a particular item of medical knowledge itself is to know something about the relationships of that knowledge to the experiential world it is talking about. The reason is that the patients the physician is concerned with are parts of that experiential world. So, when using any knowledge in her practice, e.g., some knowledge on infectious diseases, a morally conscientious doctor will be interested in whether, and in what way, this knowledge relates to the ‘world out (...)
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  • Disease: the phenomenological and conceptual center of practical-clinical medicine.Per Sundström - 2001 - In S. Kay Toombs (ed.), Handbook of Phenomenology and Medicine. Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 109--126.
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  • Safe, or Sorry? Cancer Screening and Inductive Risk.Anya Plutynski - 2017 - In Kevin Christopher Elliott & Ted Richards (eds.), Exploring Inductive Risk: Case Studies of Values in Science. New York: Oup Usa. pp. 149-169.
    The focus of this chapter will be on the epistemic and normative questions at issue in debates about cancer screening, with a special focus on mammography as a case study. Such questions include: How do we know who needs to be screened? What are the benefits and harms of cancer screening, and what is the quality of evidence for each? How ought we to measure and compare these benefits and harms? What are the sources of uncertainty about our estimates of (...)
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  • Disease, illness, and sickness.Bjorn Hofmann - 2016 - In Miriam Solomon, Jeremy R. Simon & Harold Kincaid (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine. New York, NY: Routledge.
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  • On defining “mental disorder”: Purposes and conditions of adequacy.Bengt Brülde - 2010 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 31 (1):19-33.
    All definitions of mental disorder are backed up by arguments that rely on general criteria (e.g., that a definition should be consistent with ordinary language). These desiderata are rarely explicitly stated, and there has been no systematic discussion of how different definitions should be assessed. To arrive at a well-founded list of desiderata, we need to know the purpose of a definition. I argue that this purpose must be practical; it should, for example, help us determine who is entitled to (...)
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  • Emerging medical technologies and emerging conceptions of health.William E. Stempsey - 2006 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 27 (3):227-243.
    Using ideas gleaned from the philosophy of technology of Martin Heidegger and Hans Jonas and the philosophy of health of Georges Canguilhem, I argue that one of the characteristics of emerging medical technologies is that these technologies lead to new conceptions of health. When technologies enable the body to respond to more and more challenges of disease, we thus establish new norms of health. Given the continued development of successful technologies, we come to expect more and more that our bodies (...)
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  • Personalized medicine: evidence of normativity in its quantitative definition of health.Henrik Vogt, Bjørn Hofmann & Linn Getz - 2016 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 37 (5):401-416.
    Systems medicine, which is based on computational modelling of biological systems, is emerging as an increasingly prominent part of the personalized medicine movement. It is often promoted as ‘P4 medicine’. In this article, we test promises made by some of its proponents that systems medicine will be able to develop a scientific, quantitative metric for wellness that will eliminate the purported vagueness, ambiguity, and incompleteness—that is, normativity—of previous health definitions. We do so by examining the most concrete and relevant evidence (...)
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  • How to Draw the Line Between Health and Disease? Start with Suffering.Bjørn Hofmann - 2021 - Health Care Analysis 29 (2):127-143.
    How can we draw the line between health and disease? This crucial question of demarcation has immense practical implications and has troubled scholars for ages. The question will be addressed in three steps. First, I will present an important contribution by Rogers and Walker who argue forcefully that no line can be drawn between health and disease. However, a closer analysis of their argument reveals that a line-drawing problem for disease-related features does not necessarily imply a line-drawing problem for disease (...)
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  • Variable meanings for the definition of disease.Harold Merskey - 1986 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 11 (3):215-232.
    It is argued that there is no agreed definition of disease. Purely biological definitions are inadequate and combined biological and social definitions are not yet satisfactory. One approach has been to say that what doctors treat is disease. We are uncomfortable with that because we feel it releases people from obligations on a basis of convenience. In practice the weight given to the idea of disease varies according to what it will imply about obligations and privileges. It is suggested that (...)
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