Treatment goals include prevention (prevention) of diseases or their complications, and the cure (healing) of curable diseases, or palliation (relief) of symptoms in incurable situations. The rehabilitation (recovery) of physical and mental abilities of the patients is the responsibility of medicine. Doctors and paramedical therapists make sure treatment plans and monitor the course of treatment in the patient record. These patient-related documents are also documents of legal significance. In medical practice are ideally scientific findings with the results of history taking, medical intuition and experience combined to the individual patient needs. Here, the personal doctor-patient relationship is essential that arises whenever someone is looking for a health problem help. According to the historian of medicine, this relationship with the advent of modern medicine has changed fundamentally. The expertise and authority of the uniformly-trained doctors has given them a dominant role, the barbers, stone cutters, as well as academic physicians of the old-not with their theories of illness were mostly unsuccessful. The medical profession today announced the broad power to define what constitutes disease and what medical and medico-political measures should be taken against it. On the other hand, the civil society (in Germany since the late imperial period) tries again to cut the paternalistic discretion of the physicians, such as the 1884 (Richard Kessler), first published legal classification of medical interventions as physical injury, for which the consent of the patient is essential. It is now a deliberative performance expected by the therapist whose expertise supports the free decision making of the patient, not replaced. The consequent duty of medical education is also under the influence of the vanquished Nazi regime today unchallenged internationally, both in current international documents like the Declaration of Helsinki and the national criminal law and professional codes of medical professions. Natural Medicine Talk is a trend today and it should be considered as serious health conversation.
Both doctors and other health professionals use an analytical concept of disease – the disease as a malfunction of the organism. Based on a contract and trust relationship, data on medical history is collected and a thorough clinical examination performed. Technical procedures for medical examination using a laboratory, diagnostic imaging such as X-ray, and many other investigative techniques such as complement the electrocardiogram, the information gathered. The medical art is to integrate the many facts and observations for diagnosis. A correct diagnosis allows for successful treatment. This analytical disease concept of scientific medicine has largely – also adopted by many alternative therapists – the ontological ideas of previous centuries largely replaced. Controversial limiting cases of the disease definition, disabilities and psychological disorders, the definition will always be social.
