Abstract
"Doing Better and Feeling Worse." This phrase is the title of a book which criticized modern American medicine in the nineteen-seventies, and it means that the better the medical personnel do, the worse the patients feel. Now in Japan, many people, not only patients and laymen but also medical personnel, may be discontented with modern medicine in the same way. This paper was prepared for discussion in the symposium titled "Concerning the Humanism of a Medical Environment in Transition". It emphasizes the importance of the socio-cultural viewpoint in inquiring into medicine, for medicine is a socio-cultural system and ideology. Using the key concept "medical pluralism", this pape tries to describe the diversity of patients' (laymen's) concepts of disease, the variety of their illness-behaviors, and the relativity of patients (laymen) and medical systems.
