Juan Manuel Torres | PubMed Health

PubMed2006

Genetic tools, Kuhnean theoretical shift and the geneticization process.

The growing use of genetic tests in medical practice has a strong influence on some widespread notions of health and unhealth. Two consequences of this phenomenon are: (i) important changes in the meaning of these current notions and, therefore, (ii) the arrival of a new taxonomy or rearrangement for the so-called "health-concepts". This paper attempts to demonstrate that both facts fuel a theoretical change that might be considered a model of scientific Kuhnean change in a fundamental aspect. On the other hand, this theoretical shift process offers the basis for approaching a present-day controversy, i.e. whether Western society is going through a period of geneticization or not, from a new perspective.

Attitude to Health↗

PubMed2002

The importance of genetic services for the theory of health: a basis for an integrating view of health.

The first part of this article shows that our effective means to know and modify directly the human genetic make-up generates singular and difficult situations for the application of fundamental medical categories. Specifically, we demonstrate that in dealing with these situations, some predominant views on health, such as descriptivism or that which reduces the state of health to not having present disabilities, cannot provide adequate answers either from the point of view of medical science or in terms of our ordinary intuitions. The second part of the article examines the reasons for the failure of these views to tackle the mentioned situations, proposes solutions to urgent problems and, finally, offers some foundations for an alternative theoretical development, id est, for a theory of health able to satisfactorily integrate our genetic dimension.

Disease↗