Abstract

CAMBROSIO, Alberto; KEATING, Peter  and  BOURRET, Pascale. Objetividad regulatoria y sistemas de pruebas en medicina: el caso de la cancerología. Convergencia [online]. 2006, vol.13, n.42, pp.135-152. ISSN 2448-5799.

The evolution of Western medicine since World War II has resulted in the emergence of new practices based on the direct interaction of biology and medicine. The post-war realignment of biology and medicine has been accompanied by the emergence of a new type of objectivity, regulatory objectivity, which is based on the systematic recourse to the collective production of evidence. Unlike the objectivity forms that emerged in earlier eras, regulatory objectivity consistently results in the production of conventions, sometimes tacit and unintentional but most often arrived to, by means of concerted programs of action. The conventions produced by regulatory objectivity create the conditions for a clinical objectivity that relies on the existence of entities and protocols produced and maintained far outside the intimate encounter between doctor and patient. By establishing endogenous forms of regulation, regulatory objectivity operates on a different level and in a different mode from those suggested by analysts who treat all regulation as a form of rationalization imposed upon medicine from the outside.

Keywords : biomedicine; objectivity; regulation; evidence; conventions.