Prognostication: A fading Hippocratic art?

Abstract

Over the past 75 years modern medicine has advanced in its ability to diagnose and treat many diseases. However, the medical profession's ability to prognosticate the course and outcome of an illness has not satisfied the needs of many patients. Physicians must not lose the ability, or desire, to consider the whole person in relation to a patient's disease. We need to ask ourselves what person has the disease, not what disease the person has. Here I endeavor to demonstrate why Hippocrates valued prognostication highly, how its importance may have faded from the consciousness of current medical practice, and how modern technology is attempting to reinvent or revise it.