To determine what defines the concept of disease and whether that concept is value laden, some authors (Lemoine 2013; 2015) advocate for an inductive approach. Lemoine argues that this examination should avoid considering value-laden disease judgments by looking at scientific descriptions of disease. I examine what medicine considers a scientific description of disease, finding that diseases are increasingly described in terms of risk. But in the face of uncertainty about what level of risk cons…
Read moreTo determine what defines the concept of disease and whether that concept is value laden, some authors (Lemoine 2013; 2015) advocate for an inductive approach. Lemoine argues that this examination should avoid considering value-laden disease judgments by looking at scientific descriptions of disease. I examine what medicine considers a scientific description of disease, finding that diseases are increasingly described in terms of risk. But in the face of uncertainty about what level of risk constitutes disease, decision-makers turn to non-epistemic values, like economic payoffs of diagnosis, to establish a clinical threshold of risk which determines where a biological variable counts as disease. An inductive examination of diseases described in terms of risk results in a concept of disease that is not value-free. This historically informed examination of the concept of disease demonstrates that the concept is a tool which is sculpted by specific actors to serve the goals of diagnosis.
