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What’s More Important in Medicine: Diagnostics, Therapeutics or Prognosis?
Posted by Ogan Gurel MD MPhil at 5 February 2007, 10:50 PM and is filed under Theranostics,Practice of Medicine,Bioinformatics,A bbott,GE Healthcare,RADIOLOGY,CMT, Diagnostics


What is more important: diagnostics, therapeutics or prognosis? While all are important, we will in this column see how past history has addressed this question and also how recent events (such as the GE acquisition of Abbott Diagnostics) shed light on this fundamental issue.

It is all too easy to take modern medicine for granted, to not delve too deeply into its assumptions and to regard it as having “simply just appeared”. However, considering the historical origins of Western medicine, reference is made to Hippocrates who is often called the “father of Western medicine”. This is not entirely true.

Medical Models

In ancient Greek times, there were two schools of thought in medicine: the Knidian, which focused on diagnosis, and the Hippocratic (or Koan) school, which focused on patient care and prognosis rather than diagnosis. With the limited knowledge and techniques available then, the Hippocratic approach – with its emphasis on passive treatment and more generalized diagnosis – was more successful. Therefore, we have been handed down the “legend” of Hippocrates as founder of our current medical culture.

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