Medicines (Basel, Switzerland)
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Thirty years after the rise of the evidence-based medicine (EBM) movement, formal training in philosophy remains poorly represented among medical students and their educators. In this paper, I argue that EBM’s reception in this context has resulted in a privileging of empiricism over rationalism in clinical reasoning with unintended consequences for medical practice. ⋯ Next, I review several of the problems that have been identified as resulting from a staunch commitment to empiricism in medical practice. Finally, I conclude that greater epistemological awareness in the medical community would precipitate a Galenic shift toward a more epistemically balanced, scientific approach to clinical research.
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Background: In the pre-Hellenistic period, the concept of medicine was not well-defined. Usually, a disease was considered as a divine punishment and its treatment was devolved to the priests who asked for healing from the divinities. The only job that could be compared to medical practice was a kind of itinerant medicine, derived from the Egyptian therapeutic tradition based only on practical experience and performed by people that knew a number of remedies, mostly vegetable, but without any theoretical bases about the possible mechanisms of action. ⋯ As the founder of the so called Methodist School, he was the first to divide acute and chronic diseases, and thought that body weakness was dependent on the excessive width of the pores, while their excessive shrinkage determines fever. According to his student Caelius Aurelianus he was the first to adopt tracheotomy as an emergency therapy for diphtheria. Conclusions: Although it is very difficult to reconstruct the theories of Asclepiades of Bithynia because of the lack of original texts, this paper attempts to focus his role and his thought in affirming the Greek medical practice in ancient Rome and to highlight his modernity.
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Background: Ovarian cancer presents a major clinical challenge in the UK. Glycogen synthase kinase-3 (GSK-3) has been linked to cancer. This study tested the impact of ShenLingLan (SLDM) on ovarian cancer cell behaviour and its links to GSK-3. ⋯ Treatment with SLDM reduced ovarian cancer cells ability to attach and migrate, which was further reduced in the presence of TWS119. Conclusions: This study identified a potential mechanism by which SLDM may exert anti-metastatic effects. Further work is needed to investigate the in vivo effects SLDM has on ovarian tumours.
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Humans have predicted the relationship between heredity and diseases for a long time. Only in the beginning of the last century, scientists begin to discover the connotations between different genes and disease phenotypes. Recent trends in next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies have brought a great momentum in biomedical research that in turn has remarkably augmented our basic understanding of human biology and its associated diseases. ⋯ Developments in the post-genomic era are believed to completely restructure the present clinical pattern of disease prevention and treatment as well as methods of diagnosis and prognosis. The next important step in the direction of the precision/personalized medicine approach should be its early adoption in clinics for future medical interventions. Consequently, in coming year's next generation biotechnologies will reorient medical practice more towards disease prediction and prevention approaches rather than curing them at later stages of their development and progression, even at wider population level(s) for general public healthcare system.