Perplexity on the AIDS paradigm
Make the case that a major shift in the HIV/AIDS paradigm could be one of the biggest earthquakes to hit science and medicine in history. A major shift in the HIV/AIDS paradigm would constitute one of the most profound intellectual and institutional earthquakes in the history of science and medicine. It would challenge not only the biomedical understanding of a virus and its pathology but also the sociopolitical and economic infrastructure that has grown around HIV research, treatment, and policy for over four decades. Such a transformation would rival the Copernican, Darwinian, or germ theory revolutions in scope and consequence. [1] [2] [3] The Structure of a Paradigm Shift Thomas Kuhn’s classical model of scientific revolutions shows that a paradigm shift fractures scientific consensus when anomalies accumulate that cannot be explained by the reigning theory. HIV/AIDS research has long been dominated by the biomedical paradigm , which locates the cause of immune coll...