The clinical-epidemiological or biomedical paradigm

Abstract

This paper takes as a starting point the concept of paradigm, defined by Thomas S. Kuhn as a set of shared examples that guide, without being reflected upon, a scientist’s activity throughout his/hers usual work, comparing it with other epistemological views, considering in detail objections raised against this descriptive model of scientific activity and proceeding on to discuss the possibility of extending such model to the epistemological investigation of medical knowledge, based on a model for the category of “disease”.