Sick or sickness? The importance of person centred healthcare and medicine paradigm

When you act for a good or just when you make a choice, you should ask yourself if the result of your action coincides with the principle that has generated it. Health and respect for our own individuality are two essential goods for the human being and also values that medicine itself should guard carefully remembering that its goal is to take care for a person and not only to cure a sick body. The means to achieve all this can only be a person-centered medicine which has the honor and the burden of considering the person (in the Kantian sense) and his health as an end, not a means. The current mainstream concept of health defined in 1948 by the World Health Organization as a state of complete mental, physical and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity remind us that medical reasoning, based on the pathogenesis operator, is no longer sufficient in dealing with requests from the citizens: is now the right time to shift the focus from sickness to health giving emphasis to the salutogenic medicine approach.