The Business of Medicine

Abstract

This chapter identifies a competence whose exercise might constitute the core business of medicine in the absence of curative competence. On the basis of an inference to the best explanation, the Inquiry Thesis is introduced: medicine is an inquiry into the nature and causes of disease, for purpose of cure. (The Inquiry and Curative Theses thus agree on the goal of medicine, but differ on its business.) The Bullshit Objection says that the core medical competence is bullshit—that is, duping patients into believing that medicine has cures when it does not. This is rejected on the basis of strong historical evidence that the ineffectiveness of medicine was widely known. The Whig’s Objection says that old medicine was just a mistake, and is rejected on the basis that it fails to acknowledge either the similarities between our epistemic position and that of our forebears, or the contribution their activities made to contemporary cures.