Response to Miles and Mezzich: “Medicine in crisis and a crisis in semantics”

Miles and Mezzich offer a welcome and comprehensive account of historical recent developments in healthcare and the role of its practice models. They identify a ‘crisis’ in medicine, which seems to have occurred in part because the science of medicine has been over-emphasised and the importance of compassion and care de-emphasised. As they point out, this crisis has been perceived to have evolved over the past one hundred years. Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) is suggested to be inadequate to solve the crisis and it may be the case that EBM, in fact, has precipitated it because it ignores patients qua persons. It is also suggested that Patient Centred Care (PCC) seeks to address the imbalance, but that this is inadequate, too. Between these existing views it is claimed that Person Centred Medicine (PCM) solves the crisis by giving persons and evidence their proper roles and relative importances