What is Medicine-A Review
Medicine is the branch of health science and the sector of public life concerned with maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis and treatment of disease and injury. It is both an area of knowledge – a science of body systems, their diseases and treatment – and the applied practice of that knowledge.An Overview
Medical care is shared between the medical profession (physicians or doctors) and other professionals such as nurses and pharmacists, sometimes known as allied health professionals. Historically, only those with a medical doctorate have been considered to practice medicine. Clinicians (licensed professionals who deal with patients) can be physicians, nurses, therapists or others. The medical profession is the social and occupational structure of the group of people formally trained and authorized to apply medical knowledge. Many countries and legal jurisdictions have legal limitations on who may practice medicine.
Medicine comprises various specialized sub-branches, such as cardiology, pulmonology, neurology, or other fields such as sports medicine, research or public health.
Human societies have had various different systems of health care practice since at least the beginning of recorded history. Medicine, in the modern period, is the mainstream scientific tradition which developed in the Western world since the early Renaissance (around 1450). Many other traditions of health care are still practiced throughout the world; most of these are separate from Western medicine, which is also called biomedicine, allopathic medicine or the Hippocratic tradition. The most highly developed of these are traditional Chinese medicine and the Ayurvedic traditions of India and Sri Lanka. Various non-mainstream traditions of health care have also developed in the Western world. These systems are sometimes considered companions to Hippocratic medicine, and sometimes are seen as competition to the Western tradition. Few of them have any scientific confirmation of their tenets, because if they did they would be brought into the fold of Western medicine.
"Medicine" is also often used amongst medical professionals as shorthand for internal medicine. Veterinary medicine is the practice of health care in animal species other than human beings.
History Of Medicine
The earliest type of medicine in most cultures was the use of plants (Herbalism) and animal parts. This was usually in concert with 'magic' of various kinds in which animism (the notion of inanimate objects having spirits), shamanism (the vesting of an individual with mystic powers), and divination (the supposed obtaining of truth by magic means) played a major role.
The practice of medicine developed gradually, and separately, in ancient Egypt, ancient China, ancient India, ancient Greece, Persia and elsewhere. Medicine as it is practiced now developed largely in the late 18th and early 19th century in England (William Harvey (late 17th century)), Germany (Rudolf Virchow) and France (Jean-Martin Charcot, Claude Bernard and others). The new, "scientific" medicine (where results are testable and repeatable) replaced early Western traditions of medicine, based on herbalism, the Greek "four humours" and other pre-modern theories.[citation needed] The focal points of development of clinical medicine shifted to the United Kingdom and the USA by the early 1900s (Canadian-born)Sir William Osler, Harvey Cushing). Possibly the major shift in medical thinking was the gradual rejection in the 1400's of what may be called the 'traditional authority' approach to science and medicine. This was the notion that because some prominent person in the past said something must be so, then that was the way it was, and anything one observed to the contrary was an anomaly (which was parralleled by a similar shift in European society in general - see Copernicus's rejection of Ptolemy's theories on astronomy). People like Vesalius led the way in improving upon or indeed rejecting the theories of great authorities from the past such as Galen, Hippocrates, and Avicenna. Such new attitudes were also only made possible by the weakening of the church's power in society.
Evidence-based medicine is a recent movement to establish the most effective algorithms of practice (ways of doing things) through the use of the scientific method and modern global information science by collating all the evidence and developing standard protocols which are then disseminated to doctors.
Genomics and knowledge of human genetics is already having some influence on medicine, as the causative genes of most monogenic genetic disorders have now been identified, and the development of techniques in molecular biology and genetics are influencing medical practice and decision-making.
Pharmacology has developed from herbalism. The modern era really began with Koch's discoveries around 1900 and the discovery of antibiotics shortly thereafter. The first major class of antibiotics was the Sulfa drugs, derived originally from Aniline dyes. Major assaults on infectious disease throughout the 20th century resulted in (Western) societies where severe infections are rare. The industry is therefore in the process of developing drugs that are more and more targeted to one particular disease process (minimising side effects), drugs to treat cancer, geriatric problems, and long-term, chronic, lifestyle and degenerative disease such as high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes and arthritis.
Practice of Medicine
The practice of medicine combines both science and art. Science and technology are the evidence base for many clinical problems for the general population at large. The art of medicine is the application of this medical knowledge in combination with intuition and clinical judgment to determine the proper diagnoses and treatment plan for each unique patient and to treat the patient accordingly.
Central to medicine is the patient-doctor relationship established when a person with a health concern or problem seeks the help of a physician (i.e. the medical encounter). Other health professionals similarly establish a relationship with a patient and may perform interventions from their perspective, e.g. nurses, radiographers and therapists.
As part of the medical encounter, the doctor needs to:
-develop a relationship with the patient
-gather data (medical history and physical examination combined with laboratory or
imaging studies)
-analyze and synthesize that data (assessment and/or differential diagnosis), and
then
-develop a treatment plan (further testing, therapy, watchful observation, referral
and follow-up)
-treat the patient accordingly
-assess the progress of treatment and alter the plan as necessary.
-The medical encounter is documented in a medical record, which is a legal document
in many jurisdictions.[1]
Source : Wikipedia
posted by Balqis @ 4:34 PM
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