Medical practice is not immune to epistemological dogmatism, particularly in its assumptions about normality, pathology, and therapeutic intervention. These challenges are magnified in contexts where medicine intersects with complex socio-cultural realities. In Africa, the coexistence of Western biomedicine and African traditional medicine creates additional conceptual, ethical, and practical tensions that demand philosophical scrutiny. This study aims to critically examine foundational concepts in medicine especially health, disease, illness, and sickness, in order to clarify contested boundaries between normality and abnormality. It further seeks to interrogate diagnostic practices, therapeutic expansion, and professional conduct from a philosophical perspective, with particular emphasis on African socio-cultural and existential contexts. The study employs an analytic–critical philosophical method. Conceptual analysis is applied to key debates in the philosophy of medicine, medical ethics, psychiatry, and medical sociology. Comparative reflection is used to situate Western biomedical practice alongside African traditional medicine, highlighting points of convergence, divergence, and ethical concern. The analysis shows that many medical controversies arise from conceptual ambiguity, scientific dogmatism, and the uncritical medicalization of non-pathological human conditions. In the African context, these problems are exacerbated by political interference, economic pressures, infrastructural deficits, and insufficient integration of psychosocial and cultural dimensions of care. Reductionist biomedical models are shown to be inadequate for addressing lived experiences of illness. Philosophical interrogation is essential for promoting ethical, humane, and context-sensitive medical practice. In Africa, a genuinely health-promoting medical model must integrate biomedical science, traditional medicine, and the humanities in order to safeguard human dignity and sustain holistic well-being.

Health-Illness Continuum, Self-Alienation, Differential Diagnosis, Therapeutics, Constructionism

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