Abstract
In “Prediction, Understanding and Medicine” Alex Broadbent rejects the curative thesis, the
view that the core medical competence is to cure, in favour of his predictive thesis that the
main intellectual medical competence is to explain and the main practical medical
competence is to predict. Broadbent thinks his account explains the phenomenon of multiple
consultation, which is the fact that people persist in consulting alternative medical traditions
despite having access to mainstream medicine. I argue that Broadbent’s explanation of
multiple consultation makes sense only from the perspective of patients who migrate from
mainstream to alternative consultation. His explanation is not as convincing when we
consider alternative‐to‐mainstream migration. I also provide an argument against
Broadbent’s view that prediction is medicine’s main practical competence and argue that
when it comes to explaining most cases of multiple consultation the curative thesis provides
a more convincing explanation than the predictive thesis.