The core business of medicine: a defence of the best available intervention thesis

Philosophy of Medicine has for a long time been preoccupied with analyzing the concepts of health, disease and illness. Relatively speaking, the concept of medicine itself has received very little attention. This paper is a contribution to the relatively neglected debate about the nature of medicine. Building on the work of Alex Broadbent (Broadbent, 2018a, b), Chadwin Harris (Harris, 2018) and Thaddeus Metz (Metz, 2018), in this paper I question the persuasiveness of Broadbent’s account of the “core business” of medicine, The Inquiry Thesis, and propose an alternative: a revised version of The Curative Thesis, which I coin The Best Available Intervention Thesis. Crudely, this suggests that Medicine is the sustained and organised effort to determine and prescribe the best available treatment (curative or preventative) for patients.