Post 1: Why is medicine the way it is? 1/2
After the first episode of this blog you will understand why you feel your medical practitioner can only explain so little while being confident the proposed treatment is absolutely best for you.
Part 1 of this topic was about medicine going beyond the borders of what is known by adopting the saying ‘One cause, one disease’. Now the question remains why medicine seems built around this odd and ambiguous saying while avoiding taking a stance on how the term ‘one’ in this saying should be conceived: identical, equal or similar.
Post 3: Centuries old ideas shaped medicine
In this article I’ll try to link XVIIe and XVIIIe century enlightenment ideas to how modern medicine is organized and operates. It will be about reductionism, evidence of the senses, different views on what science and knowledge are, separation of mind and body.
Post 4: The medical universe: reality, atoms and symtoms
During medical training I felt (western) medicine was more ‘real’ than traditional forms of medicine. I’ll try to clarify this idea by comparing ‘western medicine’ to more traditional forms of medicine. It is, without having substantial knowledge about the subject, however.
Post 5: The better explanation
Jan Willem, with whom I have been debating various science topics for over more than a decade, introduced me to Occam’s Razor. The razor states that the better explanation is not complexed beyond necessity (Tatham 1987). In philosophy the razor is usually interpreted as:
“an explanation should consist of the fewest possible new assumptions.”
About me
My name is Marcus Goevaers. This blog is about generating better medical explanatory models. I have always been intrigued by how things work (or do not work). As MD I got a particular interest in how the human body functions and how diseases come about. Most of all however I’m interested in how medicine functions itself and how this could be related to medicine’s inability to actually explain. Explain how diseases occur, how the word ‘disease’ itself should be understood and how the uniqueness of each human body fits into all of this.