Paradoxes and weakness in internal medicine

Abstract

This work is about Allopathic Medicine. It aims at analyzing the structure of the Allopathic Medicine as scientific knowledge and its action regarding life and death. The literature used for this paper deals with the relationship between medical doctor and terminal patient in oncology. To understand the phenomenon in question here we looked at the scientific works on the discussion of health, illness, knowledge, power, rationality, medical institution and death. We adopted the genealogic approach to medicine, in regard to the history of such knowledge and how this conceptual history is responsible for the definition of the professional métier. The theoretical discussions about how the knowledge of the doctors and the challenges faced in their relationship with terminal ill patients led us to the following questions that we try to answer in the paper: would the advancement of the illness and the inexorability of death say something about a set of knowledge? The complexity and the contradictions that involve the relationship between medical doctors and cancer patients were seen by the great part of the literature that deals with such question. The most problematic aspects highlighted by these studies point out to the medical education. In other words, in the learning process, the students of medicine receive a philosophical conception that separates nature from culture, founded in a theoretical-praxis orthodoxy, which chooses life as a focus. This conception becomes, even more evident, with the negation of the inexorability of death and the incurability of the illn ess in the field of oncology. This way, the medical students develop in the professional spaces a bipolar comprehension of health, illness, death, and life phenomena, compromising and making fragile their practices in regard to the limit situation. At this moment, the knowledge and the techniques learned are understood, denouncing a lack of knowledge. Keywords: Health. Illness. Allopathic Medicine. Rationality and death.