The successes recorded by modern medicine in the last 100 years are unquestionably of great importance for the life of man, as medicine has acquired instruments to help him to effectively navigate through the vast ocean of disease.

The organization of knowledge, the consciousness of public hygiene, health education and the abundant use of scientific discoveries from other branches of science such as chemistry and physics are important factors that have set a milestone of quality next to the obscure medical practices of the past.
The relentless development of pharmacology and the evolution of surgical technology and sophisticated diagnostic instruments are the expression of a growing scientific world which has supplied a solid base for obtaining results that have greatly improved the average health status of the world community.

An imaginary time traveller coming from the 1800s who could see the progress that has been made would certainly be positively struck by the current state of public health.

That notwithstanding, the goals of earlier generations cannot have the same value for those who are living through current medical problems as it had for people in the past. In other words, the level of health that we have reached – which is never to be taken for granted or as a stable situation – needs continuous improvement towards ever greater and more satisfactory levels of well-being. These can be reached only with relentless vigilance and commitment to the elimination of errors and distortions, the prevention of abuses, and the conceiving of new solutions.

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 It is too anchored to outdated concepts, and incapable of proposing innovative concepts upon which to build new foundations for medical knowledge.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.