Clinical medicine is not a theory, not even an applied theory, but a practice. This practice, I will claim, can best be understood as an interpretive meeting between health-care personnel and patient with the aim of healing the ill person seeking help. Hermeneutics will in this work be used to further explicate what is understood by ‘an interpretive meeting’, and phenomenology will be put to work to better understand the meaning of ‘health’ and ‘illness’.
What kind of thesis is this? It is best understood as a philosophical thesis; more specifically, as a thesis belonging to the sphere of the philosophy of medicine. The question that this thesis provides an answer to is thus a philosophical question; more specifically, the question, ‘What is medicine?’, and also – as a variation on this first question – the possibly more restricted question, ‘What is medical knowledge?’. (p. 2)