II CNIO-Banco Sabadell Foundation Workshop on Philosophy, Science and Medicine. Socio-environmental factors of health and disease. November 24, 2020
Cancer from a philosophical and scientific view. Cancer research is currently among the most important sources of information about how the human body works and the nature of disease. Cancer continues to be one of the most lethal diseases and its control has become a challenge for the biomedical sciences. These sciences have seen enormous progress in recent years not only in the knowledge about the disease, but also in methodology. All of this has also raised philosophical problems that have been of interest for the philosophy of science and bioethics. Indeed, issues related to pain, illness, treatment of patients and death itself cannot be approached only from the biomedical perspective, but necessarily require opening up to the field of anthropology, ethics or, more in general, to the philosophical reflection.
Socio-environmental factors of health and disease. The advances in biomedicine last years have highlighted that the diseases that afflict us are not phenomena to be understand in their complexity only from a strictly internal perspective, excluding the social, environmental and even political context. The notions of health and disease themselves have received different characterizations over time based on these contextual factors. In fact, an analysis and clarification of these questions has become the fundamental aim of the philosophy of medicine. In light of these advances, it is necessary to review carefully what it means to be healthy or sick today and what boundaries we draw between the two concepts.
Evolution, environment and biodiversity. The evolutionary approach to health and disease has become an emerging approach in the biomedical sciences and has even reached popular culture, although it has usually done so through dubious science-based recommendations, such as the so-called Paleolithic diets. On the other hand, in the media these days we have seen how the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been related to the environmental deterioration that human being are generating. In any case, it seems clear that the evolutionary and ecological perspective can shed much light on understanding the origin of human diseases and the relative importance that environmental factors and genetic factors may have.