Systems medicine is the culmination of the progression of the health/disease dichotomy to a continuum from health to disease allowing for measures of disease accumulation that mark an individual’s position, i.e., her wellness, along the continuum. Proponents of systems medicine have promised a scientific (non-normative), value-free, holistic measure of “wellness” that will be the cornerstone of P4 (personalized, predictive, preventive and participatory) medicine. While the focus of this paper is on the quantification of wellness, the authors also consider how this metric drives the rest of the P4 program. The authors trace the history of this development in order to appreciate the promises, problems, pitfalls, and perils that accompany this approach. To the 4Ps already in place, the authors add P5 = promissory and P6 = profitable, and find that the road to P6 medicine is paved with neoliberal theories.
Published in | Advances in Sciences and Humanities (Volume 4, Issue 2) |
DOI | 10.11648/j.ash.20180402.12 |
Page(s) | 25-36 |
Creative Commons |
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Copyright |
Copyright © The Author(s), 2018. Published by Science Publishing Group |
Health, Disease, Illness, Systems Medicine, Neoliberalism, Biomedicalization, Commodification
[1] | Kowalski, Charles J., and Adam J. Mrdjenovich. 2017. Beware dichotomies. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 59 (4): 517-35. |
[2] | Ahrens, Edward H., Jr. 1992. The crisis in clinical research: Overcoming institutional obstacles. New York: Oxford University Press. |
[3] | Richman, Kenneth A. 2004. Ethics and the metaphysics of medicine: Reflections on health and beneficence. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. |
[4] | Boorse, Cristopher. 1977. Health as a theoretical concept. Philosophy of Science 44: 542-7. |
[5] | Boorse, Christopher. 1975. On the distinction between health and illness. Philosophy and Public Affairs 5: 49-68. |
[6] | Kingma, Elselijn. 2007. What is it to be healthy? Analysis 67: 128-33. |
[7] | Giroux, Elodie. 2015. Epidemiology and the bio-statistical theory of disease: A challenging perspective. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 36:175-95. |
[8] | Fulford, K. W. M. 1993. Praxis makes perfect: Illness as a bridge between biological concepts of disease and social conceptions of health. Theoretical Medicine 14: 305-20. |
[9] | Richman, Kenneth A., and Andrew E. Budson. 2000. Health of organisms and health of persons: An embedded instrumentalist approach. Theoretical Medicine 21: 339-54. |
[10] | Kowalski, Charles, Steven Pennell, and Amiram Vinokur. 2008. Felicitometry: Measuring the ‘quality’ in quality of life. Bioethics 22 (6): 307-13. |
[11] | Kowalski, Charles J., Jan L. Bernheim, Nancy Adair Birk, and Peter Theuns. 2012. Felicitometrics: interpreting quality of life measurements. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 33: 207-20. |
[12] | Clauser, K. Danner, Charles M. Culver, and Bernard Gert. 2004. Malady: A new treatment of disease. In: Health, Disease and Illness, eds Arthur L. Caplan, James J. McCartney, and Dominic A. Sisti, 90 – 103. Washington D. C.: Georgetown University Press. |
[13] | Bircher, Johannes. 2005. Towards a dynamic definition of health and disease. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 8: 335-41. |
[14] | Daly, Patrick R. 2009. A theory of health and the healing arts based on the philosophy of Bernard Lonergan. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 30: 147-60. |
[15] | Daly, Patrick. 2017. An integral approach to health science and healthcare. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 38: 15-40. |
[16] | Simon, Jeremy R., Havi Carel, and Alexander Bird. 2017. Understanding disease and illness. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 38: 239-44. |
[17] | Schwartz, Peter H. 2007. Defining dysfunction: Natural selection, design, and drawing a line. Philosophy of Science 74 (3): 364-85. |
[18] | American Psychiatric Association. 2013. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Washington, DC: Author. |
[19] | Kupfer, David J., Emily A. Kuhl, and Darrell A. Regier. 2013. DSM-5—The future arrived. Journal of the American Medical Association 309: 1691-1692. |
[20] | Dawber, Thomas Royle. 1980. The Framingham Study: The epidemiology of atherosclerotic disease. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. |
[21] | Giroux, Elodie. 2013. The Framingham study and the constitution of a restrictive concept of risk factor. Social History of Medicine 26: 94-112. |
[22] | Epstein, Frederick H., Thomas. Francis, Jr., Norman S. Hayner, Benjamin C. Johnson, Marcus O. Kjelsberg, John A. Napier, Leon E. Ostrander, Jr., Millicent W. Payne, and Horace J. Dodge. 1965. Prevalence of chronic diseases and distribution of selected physiologic variables in a total community, Techumseh, Michigan. American Journal of Epidemiology 81 (3): 307-22. |
[23] | Schwartz, Peter H. 2008. Risk and disease. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 51 (3): 320-34. |
[24] | Greene, Jeremy A. 2007. Prescribing by numbers: Drugs and the definition of disease. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. |
[25] | Clarke, Adele E., Laura Mamo, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Jennifer R. Fishman, and Janet K. Shim, eds. 2010. Biomedicalization: Technoscience, health, and illness in the U.S. Durham NC: Duke University Press. |
[26] | France, Christopher M., Paul H. Lysaker, and Ryan P. Robinson. 2007. The chemical imbalance explanation for depression: Origins, lay endorsement, and clinical implications. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 38 (4): 411-420. |
[27] | Moncrieff, Joanna. 2006. Psychiatric drug promotion and the politics of neoliberalism. British Journal of Psychiatry 188 (4): 301-302. |
[28] | Frances, Allen J. 2013. Last plea to DSM 5: Save grief from the drug companies. Available at: www.huffingtonpost.com/allen-frances/saving-grief-from-dsm-5-a_b_2325108.html (Accessed January 30, 2017). |
[29] | Dumit, Joseph. 2012. Drugs for life: How pharmaceutical companies define our health. Durham NC: Duke University Press. |
[30] | Esposito, Luigi and Fernando M. Perez. 2014. Neoliberalism and the commodification of mental health. Humanity & Society 38 (4): 414-442. |
[31] | Sunder Rajan, Kaushik. 2017. Pharmocracy. Durham NC: Duke University Press. |
[32] | McDowell, Ian and Claire Newell. 1996. Measuring health, 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press. |
[33] | Bowling, Ann. 2001. Measuring disease, 2nd edition. Philadelphia PA: Open University Press. |
[34] | Shostak, Sara. 2010. Marking populations and persons at risk. In: Biomedicalization: Technoscience, health, and illness in the U.S., eds. Adele E. Clarke, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Jennifer R. Fishman, and Janet K. Shim, 242-62. Durham NC: Duke University Press. |
[35] | Shostak, Sara. 2013. Exposed science: Genes, the environment, and the politics of population health. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. |
[36] | Feinstein, Alvan R. 1987. Clinimetrics. New Haven CT: Yale University Press. |
[37] | Hood, Leroy, James R. Heath, Michael E. Phelps, and Biaoyang Lin. 2004. Systems biology and new technologies enable predictive and preventive medicine Science 306: 640-3. |
[38] | Hood, Leroy E., and Mauricio Flores. 2012. A personal view on systems medicine and the emergence of proactive P4 medicine: Predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory. New Biotechnology 29: 613-24. |
[39] | Gamma, Alex. 2014. He role of genetic information in personalized medicine. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 56 (4): 485-512. |
[40] | Rose, Nikolas. 2013. Personalized medicine: Promises, problems and perils of a new paradigm for healthcare. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 77: 341-52. |
[41] | Vogt, Henrik, Bjorn Hofman, and Linn Getz. 2016. Personalized medicine: Evidence of normativity in its quantitative definition of health. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 37: 401-16. |
[42] | Flores, Mauricio, Gustavo Glusman, Kristin Brogaard, Nathan D Price, and Leroy Hood. 2013. P4 medicine: How systems medicine will transform the healthcare sector and society. Personalized Medicine 10 (6): 565-76. |
[43] | Hood, Leroy, Rudi Balling, and Charles Auffray. 2012. Revolutionizing medicine in the 21st century through systems approaches. Biotechnology Journal 7: 992-1001. |
[44] | Hood, Leroy. 2013. Systems biology and P4 medicine: Past, present, and future. RMMJ 2013; 4 (2): e0012. doi:10.5041/RMMJ.10112. |
[45] | Price, Nathan D., Lucas B. Edelman, Inyoul Lee, Hyuntae Yoo, Daehee Hwang, George Carlson, David J. Galas, James R. Heath, and Leroy Hood. 2009. Systems biology and the emergence of systems medicine. In: Genomic and personalized medicine, eds. Huntington F. Willard and Geoffrey S. Ginsburg, 74-85. New York: Academic Press. |
[46] | Vogt Henrik, Elling Ulvestad, Thor Eirik Eriksen, and Linn Getz. 2014. Getting personal: Can systems medicine integrate scientific and humanistic conceptions of the patient? Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 20: 942-52. |
[47] | Kowalski, Charles J. 1972. A commentary on the use of multivariate statistics in anthropometric research. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 36: 119-31. |
[48] | Lewontin, Richard. 2000. The Triple Helix: Gene, organism and environment. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. |
[49] | Ibrahim, Rania, Maria Pasic, and George M. Yousef. 2016. Omics for personalized medicine: defining the current we swim in. Expert Review of Molecular Diagnostics 16 (7): 719-22. |
[50] | Vogt Henrik, Bjorn Hofman, and Linn Getz. 2016. The new holism: P4 medicine and the medicalization of health and life itself. Medical Health Care and Philosophy 19: 307-23. |
[51] | Meador, Clifton K. 1994. The last well person. NEJM 330 (6): 440-1. |
[52] | Kohane, Issac S., Daniel R. Masys, and Russ B. Altman. 2006. The Incidetalome: A threat to genomic medicine. JAMA 296 (2): 212-5. |
[53] | Rose, Nikolas. 1994. Medicine, history and the present. In: Reassessing Foucault, Power, Medicine, and the Body, eds. Colin Jones and Roy Porter, 48-72. New York: Routledge. |
[54] | Bard, Imre. 2012. Pre-empting the threat of human deficiencies. In: Neoliberalism and Technoscience, eds. Luigi Pellizzoni and Marja Ylonen, 117-38. Surrey UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited. |
[55] | Armstrong, David. 1995. The rise of surveillance medicine. Sociology of Health & Illness 17 (3): 394-404. |
[56] | Rose, Nikolas. 2010. Screen and intervene: Governing risky brains. History of the Human Sciences 23 (1): 79-105. |
[57] | Greenhalgh, Susan. 2016. Neoliberal science, Chinese style: Making and managing the ‘obesity epidemic.’ Social Studies of Science 46 (4): 485-510. |
[58] | Juengst, Eric T., Richard A. Settersten, Jennifer R. Fishman, and Michelle L. McGowan. 2012. After the revolution? Ethical and social challenges in ‘personalized genomic medicine.’ Personalized Medicine 9 (4): 429-39. |
[59] | Juengst, Eric T., Michael A. Flatt, and Richard A. Settersten. 2012. Personalized genomic medicine and the rhetoric of empowerment. Hastings Center Report 42 (5): 34-40. |
[60] | Nordgren, Anders, and Erik T. Juengst. 2009. Can genomics tell me who I am? Essentialistic rhetoric in direct-to-consumer DNA testing. New Genetics and Society 28 (2): 157-72. |
[61] | Kowalski, Charles J., and Adam J. Mrdjenovich. 2017. Personalized medicine, genomics and enhancement: Monuments to neoliberalism. American Journal of Clinical and Experimental Medicine 5 (3): 75-92. |
[62] | Smarr, Larry. 2012. Quantifying your body: A how-to guide from a systems biology perspective. Biotechnology Journal 7: 980-91. |
[63] | Stevens, Hallam. 2015. Networks: Representations and tools in postgenomics. In: Postgenomics: Perspectives on biology after the genome, eds. Sarah S. Richardson and Hallam Stevens, 103-25. Durham NC: Duke University Press. |
[64] | Gergel, Tania. 2012. Medicine and the individual: Is phenomenology the answer? Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 18 (5): 1102-9. |
[65] | Kohane, Isaac S. 2009. The twin questions of personalized medicine: who are you and whom do you most resemble? Genome Medicine 1 (1): 1-3. |
[66] | Porter, Theodore M. 1994. Objectivity as standardization: The rhetoric of impersonality in measurement, statistics, and cost-benefit analysis. In: Rethinking Objectivity, Allan Megill, ed. Durham NC: Duke University Press, pp. 197-237. |
[67] | Levins, Richard and Richard Lewontin. 1995. The Dialectical Biologist. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. |
[68] | Levins, Richard. 2007. Dialectics and systems theory. In: Biology under the Influence: Dialectical essays on ecology, agriculture, and health, eds. Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, 101-24. New York: Monthly Review Press. |
[69] | Megill, Allan, ed. 1994. Rethinking Objectivity. Durham NC: Duke University Press. |
[70] | Longino, Helen. 1990. Science as Social Knowledge: Values and objectivity in scientific inquiry. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. |
[71] | Kowalski, Charles J., Raymond J. Hutchinson, and Adam J. Mrdjenovich. 2017. The ethics of clinical care and the ethics of clinical research: Yin and yang. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 42: 7-32. |
[72] | Kowalski, Charles J., and Adam J. Mrdjenovich. 2017. Schemata, CONSORT, and the Salk polio vaccine trial. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, jhx032, http://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/jhx032. |
[73] | Matthews, J. Rosser. 1995. Quantification and the Quest for Medical Certainty. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. |
APA Style
Charles Joseph Kowalski, Adam Joel Mrdjenovich. (2018). Quantifying Wellness: Beyond the Dichotomous Choice Between Health and Disease Lies the Road to P6 Medicine. Advances in Sciences and Humanities, 4(2), 25-36. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ash.20180402.12
ACS Style
Charles Joseph Kowalski; Adam Joel Mrdjenovich. Quantifying Wellness: Beyond the Dichotomous Choice Between Health and Disease Lies the Road to P6 Medicine. Adv. Sci. Humanit. 2018, 4(2), 25-36. doi: 10.11648/j.ash.20180402.12
AMA Style
Charles Joseph Kowalski, Adam Joel Mrdjenovich. Quantifying Wellness: Beyond the Dichotomous Choice Between Health and Disease Lies the Road to P6 Medicine. Adv Sci Humanit. 2018;4(2):25-36. doi: 10.11648/j.ash.20180402.12
@article{10.11648/j.ash.20180402.12, author = {Charles Joseph Kowalski and Adam Joel Mrdjenovich}, title = {Quantifying Wellness: Beyond the Dichotomous Choice Between Health and Disease Lies the Road to P6 Medicine}, journal = {Advances in Sciences and Humanities}, volume = {4}, number = {2}, pages = {25-36}, doi = {10.11648/j.ash.20180402.12}, url = {https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ash.20180402.12}, eprint = {https://article.sciencepublishinggroup.com/pdf/10.11648.j.ash.20180402.12}, abstract = {Systems medicine is the culmination of the progression of the health/disease dichotomy to a continuum from health to disease allowing for measures of disease accumulation that mark an individual’s position, i.e., her wellness, along the continuum. Proponents of systems medicine have promised a scientific (non-normative), value-free, holistic measure of “wellness” that will be the cornerstone of P4 (personalized, predictive, preventive and participatory) medicine. While the focus of this paper is on the quantification of wellness, the authors also consider how this metric drives the rest of the P4 program. The authors trace the history of this development in order to appreciate the promises, problems, pitfalls, and perils that accompany this approach. To the 4Ps already in place, the authors add P5 = promissory and P6 = profitable, and find that the road to P6 medicine is paved with neoliberal theories.}, year = {2018} }
TY - JOUR T1 - Quantifying Wellness: Beyond the Dichotomous Choice Between Health and Disease Lies the Road to P6 Medicine AU - Charles Joseph Kowalski AU - Adam Joel Mrdjenovich Y1 - 2018/08/18 PY - 2018 N1 - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ash.20180402.12 DO - 10.11648/j.ash.20180402.12 T2 - Advances in Sciences and Humanities JF - Advances in Sciences and Humanities JO - Advances in Sciences and Humanities SP - 25 EP - 36 PB - Science Publishing Group SN - 2472-0984 UR - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ash.20180402.12 AB - Systems medicine is the culmination of the progression of the health/disease dichotomy to a continuum from health to disease allowing for measures of disease accumulation that mark an individual’s position, i.e., her wellness, along the continuum. Proponents of systems medicine have promised a scientific (non-normative), value-free, holistic measure of “wellness” that will be the cornerstone of P4 (personalized, predictive, preventive and participatory) medicine. While the focus of this paper is on the quantification of wellness, the authors also consider how this metric drives the rest of the P4 program. The authors trace the history of this development in order to appreciate the promises, problems, pitfalls, and perils that accompany this approach. To the 4Ps already in place, the authors add P5 = promissory and P6 = profitable, and find that the road to P6 medicine is paved with neoliberal theories. VL - 4 IS - 2 ER -