Why Cannot Today's Medicine Tolerate Man?

Today, anyone who has travelled a little through history or reflected on social systems knows that although they are established and designed to satisfy our needs and demands, they have needs of their own which guarantee their life and may precede our needs. Hence, these systems, which were supposed to serve us obediently like the magic lamp genie, make us serve them in different ways. Medicine is one of such social systems which were undoubtedly established to satisfy our vital need to care and cure. To exist and develop, medicine needs to know and control personal and social conditions, and to satisfy these, it needs knowledge, money, and, perhaps prior to all of these, it needs to be trusted. To be known, man should be completely uncovered, observable, and dissected into his parts and the relationship between his parts should be explained in simple models. And to direct the condition toward maximum health, man should be converted into a statistical entity and his individual differences, conditions, and narratives have to be ignored so that he becomes predictable and, consequently, controllable creature. The story of relative, and almost necessary, conflict between man and medicine is as simple as it is explained. Before we go any further into the discussion, we should remember that a real man, with his whole phenomenological world and new-emergent and unique properties of autonomy and consciousness, may suddenly behave like a joker and disturb all the rules of medicine's play. It is natural that such subtleties cannot be tolerated by a materialistic model which is relied on knowledge of mechanistic organization of parts. The aim of this theoretical essay is to increase the readers' awareness of biomedical model restrictions and organized cruelties it imposes on man in practice and theory. The discussion of alternate models which we are turning to recently are dealt with in other essays.