The Basis of Medical Practice

Overall, medical practice is carried out when physicians identify health concerns, e.g., diseases, mental disorders, and physical injuries, and provide treatments for patients in order to properly cure them of their maladies. Medical practice should be based on science—specifically, scientific research focused on discovering medical treatments—, ethical considerations regarding the wellbeing of patients that limit science, and intuition. However, because science is limited by ethical considerations and scientific evidence is sometimes unavailable, then the most important basis should be physicians’ intuition influenced by their past medical experience.

On the whole, science plays a major role in the realm of medicine, as it is the foundation for the creation of new treatments and advancement of the medical field’s healing capability. Science is defined as field of knowledge based on discovering the truth about nature through formulating hypotheses and conducting research in an objective manner (Ehrenreich 19-20). The aspect of scientific research is significant because as more diseases and other medical conditions are identified, scientists need to determine possible cures and develop medicine in order for physicians to treat their patients. For example, neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran recounts how patients with “reflex sympathetic dystrophy” participated in a scientific experiment that tested if there was a way to cure the unremitting pain associated with the syndrome (17). As a result of scientific research, a new and effective treatment for those with RSD was discovered when patients’ pain disappeared and mobility returned to limbs after undergoing a procedure that employed mirrors (18). Through the powers of science, variou...

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...ck competence, sincerity, or diligence, but because they must make decisions about tremendously complex problems with very little solid evidence available to back them up” (Kumar and Nash 82-83). Though intuitive errors may be made, some of these are due to how the discovery of new ailments is continuous, and how humankind still does not understand everything about how illnesses and biological systems function. The treatment of medical conditions has still not been perfected and is the reason why the field of medicine is still attempting to discover new, innovative ways to cure diseases and other medical conditions.

Though there may be certain issues regarding the individual doctors and their anomalous choices, overall the appropriate foundation for medical practice is a combination of the three facets of science, ethical considerations, and informed intuition.