Medicine is the applied science, or the application of human knowledge to build or design useful things, or practice of: the diagnosis, the identification of the nature and cause of anything; treatment (“healing,” literally meaning “to make whole”), the process of the restoration of health to an unbalanced, diseased or damaged organism; and prevention of disease, an abnormal condition affecting the body of an organism.
It encompasses a variety of health care practices, the diagnosis treatment, and prevention of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in humans, evolved to maintain and restore health, the level of functional or metabolic efficiency of a living being. It is through the following: prevention (“preventive medicine/care”), consisting of measures taken to prevent diseases, (or injuries) rather than curing them or treating their symptom); and treatment, or “therapy,” the attempted remediation of a health problem, usually following a diagnosis; of illness (sometimes referred to as “ill-health” or “ailment”), a state of poor health, in human beings (“Homo sapiens”), primates of the family Hominidae, and the only living species of the genus “Homo.”
Contemporary medicine applies: health care science, the applied science dealing with the application of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics, to the delivery of healthcare; biomedical research (or “experimental medicine), in general simply known as “medical research,” the basic research, applied research, or translational research conducted to aid and support the body of knowledge in the field of medicine; and medical technology, encompassing a wide range of healthcare products and is used to diagnose, monitor or treat diseases or medical conditions affecting humans; a proper subset of health technology, “any intervention that may be used to health, to prevent , diagnose or treat disease or for rehabilitation or long-term care. This includes the pharmaceuticals, devices, procedures and organizational systems used in health care.”
The aforementioned branches is to diagnose, referring to both the process of attempting to determine or identify a possible disease or disorder (and diagnosis in this sense can also be termed (medical) “diagnostic procedure”), and to the opinion reached by this process (also being termed (medical) “diagnostic opinion”), and treat injury and disease. It is usually through medication–”pharmaceutical drug,” also referred to as “medicine” or “medication,” can be loosely defined as any chemical substance intended for use in the medical diagnosis, cure, treatment, or prevention of disease–or surgery, an ancient, medical specialty that uses operative manual and instrumental techniques on a patient to investigate and/or treat a pathological condition such as disease or injury, or to help improve bodily function or appearance. It can also be through therapies as diverse as: psychotherapy, a general term referring to the therapeutic interaction or treatment between a trained professional and a client, patient, family, couple, or group; external splints and traction, a device used for support or immobilization of limbs or of the spine; prostheses (“prosthetic limb”), in medicine, a device that replaces a missing body part; biologics (“biologic medical product”), also known as a “biological product,” or more simply as a “biological,” a medicinal product such as a vaccine, blood or blood components, allergenic, somatic cell, gene therapy, tissue, recombinant therapeutic protein, or living cells that are used as therapeutics to treat diseases; ionizing radiation–”radiation therapy (American English)/oncology,” or “radiotherapy” (United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia), sometimes abbreviated to XRT or DXT, the medical use of ionizing radiation, generally as part of cancer treatment to control or kill malignant cells–and others.
The word “medicine” is derived from the Latin “Ars medicina,” meaning “the art of healing.”