Publication of the week:

PROFESSOR ANDREW MILES

Monday 1 March 2010

Andrew Miles, "On a Medicine of the Whole Person: away from scientistic reductionism and towards the embrace of the complex in clinical practice", Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 15 (2009), 941-949.

This article is based on a lecture delivered by Professor Miles to the First Morgagni Lectures on The Light and Shade of Evidence-based Medicine of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità at the Università La Sapienza in Rome in 2008. In the introduction, he writes:

Medicine … is a science-using practice, but science cannot represent or be equated with the essence of medicine in any fundamental sense. In describing medicine, we must therefore draw the distinction between the word scientific (which correctly describes much of medicine’s knowledge) and the word science (which falsely describes medicine’s nature).

He argues for co-operation between "those that promote scientific medicine and those that emphasize the importance of applying science to patients within a framework of the arts of medicine", appreciating the limits of biomedical science in the care of individual patients and re-integrating the essential arts of medicine such as compassion and empathy back into practice, thus "making a Medicine for the Whole Person a perfectly attainable ideal."

The full text of the article can be downloaded from the Wiley Interscience website (external link) until 31 May 2010 (click on the HTML or PDF link for the full text).

Professor Andrew Miles is Chair of Public Health Education and Policy at Buckingham, and Associate Dean of Medicine (Public Health). He has been Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, an international organ of scholarly communication in health services research and public health policy, for the last 15 years, and has been National Director of the UK Key Advances in Clinical Practice Series, a major programme of national postgraduate medical education, for the last 12 years.