IV Annual Cycle Young Social Scientists
2008-2009

November 19th, 2008, 17:00, CES Seminar Room
 
Hélder Raposo (ESTeSL e ISCTE)

The imperatives of standardization and the (ir)rationality of clinical experience in contemporary medicine

Abstract: Evidence-Based Medicine corresponds to a process of recent transformation inside practical medicine. Understood by its promoters as a new methodology that allows conferring larger objectivity and validity to clinical decision processes, it has come to establish itself not only as one of the main criteria for clinical intervention, but also as fundamental requirement in the promotion of effectiveness and efficiency of resources and health investments based on probabilistic estimates. The recent tendency of quantification and objectivation in medicine is indicative of a new profile that has come to deeply transform the concepts of individuation and subjectiveness  that constitute a central axis of clinical experience, and dislodge today its focus of attention towards the direction of population analysis based on biomedical and statistical experimentation. In this manner, the tensions and “epistemological rivalries” inside the medical profession are becoming notorious, originating complex reconfigurations of the humanitarian ethos of the profession, be it through the erosion of the “medical artsmanship”, the secundarization of clinical experience or the devaluation of uncertainty. In a non unitarian and heterogeneous field, how to assess the cultural and epistemic divisions in its bosom and how to interpret the reasons of the growing emphasis on standardization and engagement of the rationalization of Medicine?

 Biographic note: Hélder Raposo holds a Degree in sociology at Lusófona University for Humanities and Technologies and is Master in Communication, Culture and Information Technologies at ISCTE. Presently he is Associate Professor in the Scientific Area of Sociology at Higher School for Health Technology of Lisbon (ESTeSL, researcher at CIES/ISCTE and is currently working on his Doctoral Degree at the Institute for Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. Among other publications, is co-author of Os portugueses e os novos riscos, edited by Imprensa de Ciências Sociais of the University of Lisbon (2007).