HLTA02H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1&2: Chevrolet Hhr, Health Care In Canada, Flexner Report
21 Oct 2012
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Document Summary
Evolution and the dominant paradigm of scientific medicine. Modern scientific medicine is founded on the work of koch, pasteur and other bacteriologists. The germ theory of disease, is the isolation of specific bacteria as the etiologic agents in several infectious diseases that created a profound change in medicines diagnostic and therapeutic assumptions, it is also a uni-factorial model of disease. The paradigm of specific etiology and specific therapies is that people can be made healthy by medical technologies and technological fixes, it is a mechanistic/robot model. Philosophers like descartes established the philosophical base for a machine model of the human. Disease is an alteration, a pathological change in the body machinery that must be fixed . This approach basically ignores social causes of much ill health. The form and nature of medicine is determined by class and power relations in the society and not by scientific imperatives.
