[Causality and disease].

Abstract

The interpretation of the causal relations in the beginning of a disease offers a central problem in medicine. It obtains a special interest with the increasing significance of the chronic diseases. The handling of this problem cannot depend on the experience of the every day life. It must take in consideration the general aspects of the causality as they are the topic of modern physics and biology as well as of philosophy. In the principle acknowledgement of the principle of causality a change from a deterministic monocausal to a more complex thinking takes place considering a complex of conditions followed by a field of possibilities of effects. Special interest needs the differentiation between the description and the interpretation of causal relations that means between ontological and epistemological thinking. The causal relation in medicine depends on the same principles as in physics and in biology.