Le ricostruzioni di processi patologici

(The Reconstructions of Pathological Processes)

Abstract

In clinical medicine as well as in the sciences, data may be insufficient to reconstruct a process that is occurring or has already happened. In clinical medicine in particular, data insufficiency may give rise to a great variety of conjectures. The specificity and particular role of conjectures in the reconstruction of individual pathological processes contributes to clarify the distinction between clinical medicine, which would be idiographic, and pathological medicine, which would be nomothetic. In general, the unavoidability of making conjectures ultimately depends on the difficulty of connecting what can be observed from the outside and what happens inside the human body. The difficulty is even greater when the data that are accessible at a given time are not collected and recorded and thus are not available at a later time. In these cases, not only do conjectural reconstructions end up being very different but also the possibility to decide among them seems to disappear.