Doctors, psychiatrists and disease

Michael Lavin

Social Science & Medicine, 1985, vol. 20, issue 5, 535-543

Abstract: The paper's aim is to show how moral concerns may be kept segregated from strictly medical concerns. To do this, the doctor's speciality is characterized in terms of disease. Doctors may plausibly make special claims qua doctors when they are treating disease. Since mental diseases are sometimes thought to be more than immoral behavior, the concept of disease receives detailed treatment. So-called 'antipsychiatric' arguments against the existence of purely mental disease are restated. It is accepted that these arguments illustrate the need to insist that genuine diseases have, at least in principle, an underlying physical pathology. It is then argued that prevalent philosophical analyses which seek to do away with the physical pathology requirement do not adequately meet antipsychiatric arguments, and threaten to allow the annexation of morals by medicine. Finally, some conclusions are drawn as to what conclusion might reasonably be drawn concerning psychiatry if it is allowed that diseases must involve physical pathology.

Date: 1985
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