Medicine, Metaphors and Metaphysics

Is there a point at which medical intervention becomes counter productive? This work is an examination of this concept, contending that as health policies increasing shift towards evidence-based and guideline-driven practice they risk losing sight of the complexities and ambiguities inherent to human physiology and patients' lives. Heuristics and cultural constructs ("more is better") are all too often confused with science - leading to expensive, ineffective health care. Using a single concept, therapeutic equivalence, this interdisciplinary analysis covers the trajectory of modern medicine and blends history, ethics, economics, politics, pharmacology, communications, medical sociology and clinical medicine. Of interest to clinicians, patients, public health/policy experts, educators and social scientists, this book is a reminder that no matter how advanced our technologies and biomedical interventions might become, medicine remains an art as well as a science.