Redefining Medicine from an Anticipatory Perspective

The meaning of anticipation in the current practice of medicine is limited to progressively earlier symptoms and higher intensity of disease from generation to generation. Anticipation, in its broader sense ascertained in this study, is definitive of the living. Given this more encompassing understanding of anticipation, to characterize only genetic disorders in terms of anticipatory expression is rather limited and limiting. It underlies evolution and as such it explains why diminished anticipatory expression results in conditions that become the subject of medical care. Only when medicine aligns itself with the implicit characteristic of life and overcomes its reactive obsession, will medical care evolve from an almost exclusively mechanistic activity to a proactive practice of well-being. This does not mean that reactive medicine has to be abandoned. There are life situations when the physics of the living has to be maintained. Moreover, the interface between the physical and the living is of extreme significance if indeed interaction, which undergirds change, is to become the source of creativity and innovation in medicine.