Diagnosis, therapy, responsibility, and ethical considerations

Abstract 

Now more than ever before, scientific decisions have ethical and political implications. This means that both doctors and society as a whole are involved. If we consider the changes there have been in the paradigms that underlie medicine and the greater stress now placed on biology in medicine, it is obvious that we need to rethink standard definitions and thus, in turn, to redefine what is normal and what is pathologic. Medicine acts on what is pathologic, but how is this defined? Is medicine unique in needing new definitions? We have to give some thought to doctors’ new responsibilities.