Illness as Lived Experience and as the Object of Medicine

Abstract

Illness presents a very large display of aspects and possible appreciations. It is an extremely complex “reality” and, for this reason, evaluating and treating it from a unique point of view, even that of medicine, turns out to be always reductive, and even arbitrary. Indeed we can say that at the very moment we attribute to medicine the specific task of being concerned with illness, the concept of medicine receives an unexpected semantic latitude, that is, the possibility of being understood according to quite different models, each one of them being related to the way illness is conceived (though, in a second moment, the “kind” of medicine adopted conveys a particular way of interpreting illness itself).