The jibarization of logos: how medical reductionism can kill

In recent decades, a disciplinary and sub disciplinary proliferation has been triggered both in the medical fields and science in general. This trend may be partially explained by two diachronic, dialectically interconnected facts: the deepening of the technical, social and international division of labor in the globalized capitalist world, and the triumph of the reductionist program, mainly developed by the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle. This paper aims to deepen the debate on the intricate links between medicine, biology, philosophy, reductionism, and complex thought, by using two examples: a current clinical case report and the situation experienced by a famous American scientist, Stephen Jay Gould, about his first cancer, an abdominal mesothelioma. We have witnessed how the two above-mentioned historical facts have been operating as a super-structure like a pair of “tweezers”, dismembering and compressing at the same moment the object of knowledge, the theories that allow their study, and the subject that receives the knowledge. This jibarization of knowledge is a real problem for public health, from the moment that it impacts, omnipresent, in the actual hegemonic medical model, leading to potentially dangerous attitudes in the various components of health systems.