Epistemiologic

Faced with new and as yet unmet medical need, the stark underperformance of the pharmaceutical discovery process is well described if not perfectly understood. Driven primarily by profit rather than societal need, the search for new pharmaceutical products-small molecule drugs, biologicals, and vaccines-is neither properly funded nor sufficiently systematic. Many innovative approaches remain significantly underused and severely underappreciated, while dominant methodologies are replete with problems and limitations...

Diabetes in the setting of diseases of the exocrine pancreas has long existed as a known, but underdiagnosed or misdiagnosed, disorder. It currently finds itself in a state of taxonomic dereliction and requires a long overdue refurbishment. Correct conceptualisation is a key precondition for knowledge development in this disorder. This article lays out the epistemological foundation for diabetes of the exocrine pancreas (DEP) and presents a synthesis of the current interdisciplinary discourse on diagnosing and classifying DEP...

The aim of this article is to critically discuss what conclusions can be drawn about health risks or innocuousness of exposures from an epistemiological point of view. For the interpretation of the epidemiological evidence of health risks, several assumptions have to be met--some of them cannot be empirically checked. Replication of study findings does not necessarily imply causation. However, it is possible to falsify hypotheses based on emipirical studies. This falsification principle can also be used for the interpretation of a single study...

Comorbidity is one of the greatest research and clinical challenges to contemporary psychiatry. Mental disorders are often comorbidly expressed, both among themselves and with various sorts of somatic diseases and illnesses. Shifting the paradigm from vertical/mono-morbid interventions to comorbidity and multimorbidity approaches enhances effectiveness and efficiency of human resources utilization. Comorbidity studies have been expected to be an impetus to research on the validity of current diagnostic systems as well as on establishing more effective and efficient treatment including personalized pharmacotherapy...

Social medicalization transforms people's habits, discourages them from finding their own solutions to certain health problems and places an excess demand on the Unified Health System. With regard to healthcare provision, an alternative to social medicalization is the pluralization of treatment provided by health institutions namely through the recognition and provision of alternative and complementary practices and medicines. The objective of the article was to analyze the potentials and difficulties of alternative and complementary practices and medicines based on clinical and institutional experiences and on the specialist literature...

This study is about interdisciplinarity as a phenomenon and as an emerging subject in Science, which has been divided into many knowledge and professional formation specialties or disciplines, mainly in the health and nursing areas. The approach is of a critical and philosophical nature and the main intention is to point out difficulties and problems with the aim of encouraging and further advancing the discussion. General, more current concepts are presented along with epistemological ideas subjacent to the repercussions of teamwork and transcendent to the conscience beyond the subject's philosophy...

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Our concept of nine risk evaluation criteria, six risk classes, a decision tree, and three management categories was developed to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and political feasibility of risk management procedures. The main task of risk evaluation and management is to develop adequate tools for dealing with the problems of complexity, uncertainty. and ambiguity. Based on the characteristics of different risk types and these three major problems, we distinguished three types of management--risk-based, precaution-based, and discourse-based strategies...

The aim of this paper is to identify barriers to communication between physicians and cancer patients regarding complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) by exploring the perspectives of patients. In face of the recent popularity of CAM use among cancer patients, the lack of communication is a serious problem. A number of CAM therapies may interfere with conventional treatments and thus impact patients' well-being and chances of survival. In addition, lack of communication is problematic in the health care context because the development of openness and trust between health care providers and clients is contingent upon effective interpersonal communication...

This text describes, in an epistemological perspective, the development of the concept of cellular therapy applied to the treatment of type 1 diabetes. Emphasis is put on three recent papers describing the success of islet allograft in diabetic patients, the development of neo-islets from stem cells isolated from the pancreas of adult mice, and the effect of hepatic cell transfection with an adenovirus bearing the gene coding for PDX-1, a transcription factor involved in the maturation of islets of Langerhans...

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Some decennia ago, the concept of alexithymia was developed from the clinical experience of psychosomaticians who at the time were largely working within a psychoanalytic frame of reference. Alexithymia can briefly be described as a cognitive-affective disturbance characterized by difficulties in differentiating one's feelings and expressing them in words. Clinicians who treat patients with medically unexplained physical symptoms may often recognize alexithymic features in their patients. It is supposed that alexithymia could be a predisposing factor for the development or persistence of medically unexplained physical symptoms...

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The currently most important forms of psychotherapy, these are behavioral therapy and psychoanalysis, are based on theories created around the turn of the century. During that time little was known on neurobiological aspects of brain plasticity, that is regarded here as prerequisition for any long lasting change in behavior, cognition and emotions and, thus, for all real psychotherapeutic effects. In the last decades, research of structural and functional plasticity has made dramatic progresses; this research may enhance our understanding of what is feasible and what can be achieved by the various forms of psychotherapy...

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No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

About 10 years ago academics discovered the fact that people actually take care of themselves. This was a process rather reminiscent of the academic discovery of poverty in the sixties [1. Poverty Studies in the Sixties. A Selected and Annotated Bibliography. U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Washington, D.C., 1970]. Like poverty, self-care had 'always been with us', but it had not been deemed worthy of scientific interest. Not only did this expose a gap within sociological research on health and medicine, it also gave new impetus to long-standing debates within sociology of knowledge and epistemiology...