These aspects are becoming more pressing because, for a number of years, many have begun to sense that medicine is becoming stalled. It is too anchored to outdated concepts, and incapable of proposing innovative concepts upon which to build new foundations for medical knowledge.
There is pressing need for new, life-giving sap to impart vigour to an asphyxiating theoretical structure whose philosophy, research, and practice no longer seems aligned with our times. The advanced and demanding society in which we live is no longer satisfied with the domination, for a limited time, of any disease by using the knowledge of physics and chemistry. The need to research and introduce therapies that take the integrity and the permanence of a human being into account is emerging more and more forcefully in our society; this in an economy of health that has the widest field possible, and that is adequate to face those degenerative and chronic diseases that today can no longer be fought with current therapies that are narrow, limited and obsolete.
There has been a transition in the last century from the predominance of sthenic pathologies, that is, those that occur in a young, fit body, to that of asthenic diseases that occur in patients who are older and less fit. The notable scientific and social consequences of this change have not been paralleled with increased medical consciousness such as to favour a widening of the theoretical boundaries of a disease.
