LAUSR

Every medical intervention is embedded in the prevailing spirit of its particular time. The world of modern medicine that is still shaped by positivism is often revered as a world of rational calculation and reason, a world in which mathematical calculation and so-called objectivity are prized above all else. Indeed, today's modern medicine in general and its battlewagon evidence-based medicine is a world of sober number games, reduction and fragmentation, of demystification and de-subjectification. As important and indispensable the achievements of EbM are, it nevertheless needs to be expanded by a medicine, which focuses not just on illness and its treatment but which places the concrete individual with all his or her sufferings and potentials. Such a human-based medicine (HbM) is no longer indebted to modern positivism, but seeks its foundations in the maxims of post-modernism. Moving away from classical “indication-based medicine” toward a medicine based on human sufferings and potentials necessarily requires a fundamental change in diagnostics and treatment. Disclosure of interest The author has not supplied his declaration of competing interest.