This article presents a reflection on the construction and application of scientific truths, within clinical activity, and its relationships with physicians' ethical mission. It analyzes troublesome aspects of the transformations made by biomedicine in two critical moments of truth production: 1) the accomplishment of cure; and 2) its relationship with therapeutics. The ethical mission of biomedicine is to cure patients and to promote their health, but its knowledge is focused on cure or control of specific diseases. The truths made by science supply the tendency for the conversion of patients into diseases, and their cure into cure or disease control and its risks. This involves an ethical and epistemological process of "deresponsibilization" of biomedical healers. The ethical "deresponsibilization" changes practitioners' identity, who begin to regard themselves more as scientists and less as healers. The epistemological "deresponsibilization" is the projection of all competence for production of true knowledge in biomedical science. This fact exempts practitioners from producing knowledge for their own activity, disqualifying all knowledge of patients and other non-scientific healers. This article proposes a critical, flexible and pragmatic perspective in the relationship with scientific truths, and the submission of this relationship to the practitioners' role of healers, centered in the patients and in their cure, conceived as more autonomy and more freedom. It points out to the need of rebuilding the ethical-epistemological responsibility of practitioners.
Medicine; Philosophy; methodology; public health; medical ethics
