Effectiveness of medical interventions

•To be effective, a medical intervention must improve one's health by targeting a disease.•I defend a hybrid account of disease.•For a state to be a disease that state must both (i) have a constitutive causal basis and (ii) cause harm.•This entails that a medical intervention must target either the constitutive causal basis of a disease or the harms caused by the disease (or ideally both).•This account provides a theoretical underpinning to the two principle aims of medical treatment: care and cure.

To be effective, a medical intervention must improve one's health by targeting a disease. The concept of disease, though, is controversial. Among the leading accounts of disease—naturalism, normativism, hybridism, and eliminativism—I defend a version of hybridism. A hybrid account of disease holds that for a state to be a disease that state must both (i) have a constitutive causal basis and (ii) cause harm. The dual requirement of hybridism entails that a medical intervention, to be deemed effective, must target either the constitutive causal basis of a disease or the harms caused by the disease (or ideally both). This provides a theoretical underpinning to the two principle aims of medical treatment: care and cure.