Work

Understanding Symptoms: Diagnosis, Cure, and Bodily Reintegration

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: What is lost if we don’t have a diagnosis? This article examines the aims of clinical medicine and the role of understanding in these aims. Starting from a case prompt with a patient suffering from persistent physical symptoms, I argue that understanding is at the clinical core and that the target of such understanding is the patient’s body with symptoms. Synthesizing accounts of medical understanding and phenomenology of illness, I suggest that the understanding sought in the clinic extends beyond mechanistic explanation to include a sense of bodily intelligibility and that diagnoses are useful but not necessary tools to this end.

Source: Philosophy of Science

DOI: 10.1017/psa.2025.10175

Author: Helene Scott-Fordsmand

Institutions: University of Cambridge, Aarhus University Hospital, University College London

Language: English

Topic: Medicine, History, and Philosophy

Subfield: Psychiatry and Mental health

Field: Medicine

Domain: Health Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,550