15.1. Development and interaction of anthropological studies
Modern medicine focuses not only on surgery, therapy, prevention, and social hygiene. Along with the study of the intimate pathological mechanisms and the nature of diseases, growing attention is directed to the health and the complex of factors, which enhance vitality, viability, and longevity of people. This approach overcomes the biological and pathophysiological limitations of the current biomedical model mainly focused on the somatic features and makes a particular emphasis on socioeconomical, technocultural, moral, and psychological conditions of human life that determine normal functioning of human organism. Convergence of medicine with engineering and economics (for instance, in the industrial medicine) and especially with education is one of the trends in the development of modern healthcare systems.
The progress in modern sciences is characterized with duality of the opposite trends, i.e. growing differentiation of scientific knowledge and simultaneous integration of different scientific disciplines. Emergence of novel scientific perspectives in recent decades evidently resulted from growing differentiation and progress in the analytical methods of modern science. However, in medicine and healthcare, this trend is closely intertwined with synthetic approaches to the real integrative and complex types of human activity. Thus, specialization of knowledge in this field is frequently accompanied with complex integration of individual anthropological sociomedical knowledge. Below we show some examples of such anthropological integration.
The second half of 20th century pronouncedly changed the interrelationships between various sciences, which examine the human beings as personal, organismic, evolutional and historical phenomenon, the subject to nurture and education, etc. At present, the natural and social sciences as well as medicine, pedagogics, economic and engineering branches are closely and directly connected. Emergence of cybernetics prompted the physico-mathematical sciences to study of human being. The progress in biochemistry exemplifies the great contribution of natural sciences into the study of autoregulated systems in human organism. The contacts between biochemistry, endocrinology, physiology of higher nervous activity, and psychology gave birth to psychopharmacology. Similarly, the tight junctions between cybernetics, biology, physiology, and psychology resulted in emergence of bionics with its main subdivision, i.e. modeling the cerebral systems with particular emphasis on the sensors analyzing the environmental medium.