Section 8
Best Medical Practice
“Best Medical Practice” is not what the ordinary person would intuit, the best treatment for an individual in a particular context. Instead it is the linking of a standardized “Treatment” with a “Diagnosis.” Thus, the concept of “diagnosis” is reified, considered to be a “thing itself”, rather than a general description of a variable constellation of symptoms and signs. This reified (“thingified”, if you will) diagnosis is linked to an unvarying “treatment.” The “Best Medical Practice” might apply to anywhere from a bare majority of sufferers to a much higher percentage.
In addition, the “Best Medical Practice” changes with time. Contradictory evidence reverses “Best Practices” so frequently that within one year, 15% must be changed; within two years, 23% are reversed; and at …show more content…
According to that principle, knowledge gained in physical sciences is limited in ways we have yet to grasp. David Newman comment that “The House of Medicine, however, continues to treat the human organism as a cause and effect model, a Cartesian machine with predictable and measurable functions in the physical world.”
Five years later, Kurt Godel published his paper “On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems.” “Godel demonstrated mathematically and irrefutably, that logical consistency and truth are not synonymous.” Mathematics and science are only true within their domains or context.
Uncertain Inference, by Henry Kyburg and Choh Man Teng, explores uncertainty and uncertain inference in depth. All interesting inference is uncertain. It is uncertain in one or both of two ways. Either some of the propositions on which the conclusion is based are uncertain, in which case that uncertainty contaminates the conclusion, or (more often) both some of the premises and the principle of inference lead to