Centre of Medical Ethics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo, PO Box 1130, Oslo, N-0318, Norway.
Institute for the Health Sciences, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Gjøvik, Norway.
Theor Med Bioeth. 2024 Apr;45(2):99-108. doi: 10.1007/s11017-023-09657-9. Epub 2024 Feb 7.
Kairos has been a key concept in medicine for millennia and is frequently understood as "the right time" in relation to treatment. In this study we scrutinize kairos in the context of diagnostics. This has become highly topical as technological developments have caused diagnostics to be performed ever earlier in the disease development. Detecting risk factors, precursors, and predictors of disease (in biomarkers, pre-disease, and pre-pre-disease) has resulted in too early diagnoses, i.e., overdiagnoses. Nonetheless, despite vast advances in science and technology, diagnoses also come too late. Accordingly, timing diagnostics right is crucial. In this article we start with giving a brief overview of the etymology and general use of the concepts of kairos and diagnosis. Then we delimit kairos in diagnostics by analysing "too early" and "too late" diagnosis and by scrutinizing various phases of diagnostics. This leads us to define kairos of diagnostics as the time when there is potential for sufficient information for making a diagnosis that is most helpful for the person. It allows us to conclude that kairos is as important in diagnostics as in therapeutics.
在医学领域，kairos 已经有几千年的历史了，通常被理解为与治疗相关的“恰当时机”。在本研究中，我们审视了诊断学中的 kairos。由于技术的发展使得疾病的诊断能够在更早的阶段进行，这一概念变得非常热门。在生物标志物、疾病前期和疾病前期检测疾病的风险因素、前兆和预测因素，导致了过早的诊断，即过度诊断。然而，尽管科学技术取得了巨大进步，诊断有时也为时过晚。因此，正确把握诊断时机至关重要。在本文中，我们首先简要概述了 kairos 和诊断这两个概念的词源和一般用法。然后，我们通过分析“过早”和“过晚”的诊断以及仔细研究诊断的各个阶段来对诊断学中的 kairos 进行限定。这使我们将诊断学中的 kairos 定义为有足够的信息来做出最有助于患者的诊断的时机。这使我们得出结论，kairos 在诊断学中与治疗学同样重要。
