Kathryn Tabb (Columbia University)
The Precision Medicine Initiative introduced by the Obama administration in 2015 has been heralded as a paradigm shift in medicine. Here I make both historical and philosophical arguments against the virtue of medical precision, and in favor of a competing virtue that I call "medical skepticism." Medical skepticism originated in Pyrrhonian philosophy, and I discuss its rediscovery in the early modern period, when physicians argued against physiological explanations in favor of reliable correlations between diagnoses and interventions. I conclude that this history can help bring the contingency of the current vogue for precision into view, and provide an intriguing alternative.
