ReviewMedicine, health care, and philosophy2001
On the difficulty of defining disease: a Darwinian perspective.
Review in Medicine, health care, and philosophy, 2001. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Evolutionary Psychopathology of Human Pair-Bonding.Clinical neuropsychiatry · 2026Article
- The Neuroplastic Narrative and Neuro-Ecological Diversity: Non-Pathologizing Biological Foundations for Trauma-Informed Medical and Mental Health Nursing.International journal of mental health nursing · 2026Article
- Protective but Costly: The Impact of Behavioral Immune System Reactivity on Mental Health.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Article
- A Comprehensive Overview of Stress, Resilience, and Neuroplasticity Mechanisms.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Review
- Learning from disability studies to introduce the role of the individual to naturalistic accounts of disease.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2024Article
- Introducing the Neuroplastic Narrative: a non-pathologizing biological foundation for trauma-informed and adverse childhood experience aware approaches.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Reproductive Investment and Health Costs in Roma Women.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2017Article
- Regarding Obesity as a Disease: Evolving Policies and Their Implications.Endocrinology and metabolism clinics of North America · 2016Review
- Defining disease beyond conceptual analysis: an analysis of conceptual analysis in philosophy of medicine.Theoretical medicine and bioethics · 2013Article
- Research traditions and evolutionary explanations in medicine.Theoretical medicine and bioethics · 2011Article
- Stress response during development predicts fitness in a wild, long lived vertebrate.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2007Article
- Human brain evolution and the "Neuroevolutionary Time-depth Principle:" Implications for the Reclassification of fear-circuitry-related traits in DSM-V and for studying resilience to warzone-related posttraumatic stress disorder.Progress in neuro-psychopharmacology & biological psychiatry · 2006Review
- Why disease persists: an evolutionary nosology.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2005Article
- Can it be a "sin" to understand disease? On "genes" and "eugenics" and an "unconnected connection".Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2001Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Most attempts to craft a definition of disease seem to have tackled two tasks simultaneously: 1) trying to create a series of inclusion and exclusion criteria that correspond to medical usage of the word disease and 2) using this definition to understand the essence of what disease is. The first task has been somewhat accomplished, but cannot reach closure because the concept of "disease" is based on a prototype, not a logical category. The second task cannot be accomplished by deduction, but only by understanding how the body works and what each component is for, in evolutionary detail. An evolutionary view of the origins of the body and its vulnerabilities that result in disease provides an objective foundation for recognizing pathology. Our social definition of disease will remain contentious, however, because values vary, and because the label "disease" changes judgments about the moral status of people with various conditions, and their rights to medical and social resources.
Indexed as
Identifiers
11315418What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.