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In this chapter, I examine from a metaphysical perspective entities that compose the medical worldviews involved with diagnosis and therapeutics, i.e. the diagnostic and therapeutic 'stuff" that makes up the biomedical and humanistic or humane models. For example, knowing the cause of a disease is critical for being able to identify and treat it intelligibly, and forms the rational basis for diagnosis and therapeutics (see Chapters 9 and 10). For the biomedical model because disease is a physical state and the result of mechanistic causation, diagnosis and therapeutics is physical and mechanistic as well. A biomedical practitioner uses physical means by which to gather the clinical data and information necessary to determine a patient's disease state and its cause.The diagnostic procedure for the biomedical or technomedical model depends upon an outside-in approach (Davis-Floyd and St. John, 1998). The standard outsidein approach is the differential diagnostic method. Through this method, a physician uses the data generated from laboratory tests and physical examinations to eliminate the different hypotheses not causally responsible for a patient's disease state. Once the proper diagnosis is made and the nature of the diseased state determined, the role of a biomedical practitioner is to intervene in the disease process. Just like the diagnostic procedure, this intervention is also often outside-in (Davis-Floyd and St. John, 1998).

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-6797-6_5

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