Humanity is on the move and knowledge is in flux – as is the blood in the vessels.
It has long been part of everyday life in Germany that people from many different cultures live here. Most people are already third and fourth generation residents. Moreover, in view of the – mostly politically motivated – rapid and steadily increasing migration movement in recent years, many new immigrants and refugees have arrived in Germany.
This means that clinical medicine in Germany increasingly has to face a new epidemiology. Prevalence rates of common diseases are changing, but risk factors for new diseases are also subject to constant change.
Only very slowly is this idea also finding its way into pharmacology and gender medicine: namely, that research, too, can no longer use only the defined norm of the “white, 18-year-old, healthy, male, hetero-sexual Central European” as the global basis for epidemiology, metabolism and therapy response.
The EFVM is committed to bringing this aspect into focus by using the term “migration medicine”.
Realities of life change – knowledge is in flux. This must also be reflected in modern medicine. Quite in the sense of the Heraclitean aphorism: “Panta Rhei” (ancient Greek: “everything flows”): Being is not static, but to be grasped dynamically as eternal change. Being is the becoming of the whole. But behind the ceaseless flow is unity: unity in multiplicity and multiplicity in unity.