The Object of Research of Medicine and Its Place in the System of Modern Knowledge.

Abstract

The ontology of general medical science includes a set of logical definitions of most general terms that are used across medical disciplines, including: 'disease', 'disorder', 'disease course', 'diagnosis', and 'patient'. It provides a formal theory of disease that is elaborated further by which extended by specific disease ontology, including the infectious disease ontology and the mental disease ontology. The main field of researches is restricted to humans, but many terms and methods can be applied to other organisms as well. The ontology of medicine recently developed a special interest the idea of causality because the purpose of medical research is to reveal causes of disease and causes of healing. The scientific processes used to generate causal knowledge give clues to the metaphysics of causation. For example, there is quite popular idea that randomized controlled trials are more helpful in revealing causal relationships than observational studies. Here causation is understood as counterfactually dependent, so the main difference of randomized controlled trials from observational studies is that they have a comparison group in which the intervention of interest is not given. Main causal paradigms in biomedicine are the linear mono-factorial paradigm championed mainly in clinical medicine; and the non-linear, reciprocal, multi-factorial paradigm invoked in epidemiology.