Meaning

(medicine) The approach of trying various possible therapeutic treatments with no clear diagnostic guide..

Definitions by Sense

1. (medicine) The approach of trying various possible therapeutic treatments with no clear diagnostic guide.
2. (more generally) The use of multiple approaches to a single issue.
3. The application of a single approach or solution to multiple problems.
4. A tendency toward meddling or officiousness.

Example Sentences

Why interfere with a self-limited condition unless some unusual feature, a danger sign, makes its appearance? Polypragmatism was always ridiculous. Is it not polypragmatism if we do something useless, unnecessary, uncalled for?

In the later imperial age, medical polypragmatism seems to have been the order of the day. The most diverse remedies were administered, not least because, as Galen himself admitted, 'the people demand medication'.

The pressure on the physician to provide therapy and the unquestionable need for treatment have led to certain polypragmatisms.

Faced with wheezing, blue-faced patients, they felt they had to do something, and the approach they adopted was polypragmatism, or polypharmacy: they threw the medicine cabinet at the problem.

It would appear, on the whole, that the country is going through a very natural transition-period after the blossoming-time from Bellman to Runeberg, and that the present or recent literary activity is mainly on the surface, and of no particular importance. Perhaps this might be said of the parallel movements in more countries than one, or two, or three. 'Even the literary polypragmatism of Strindberg, as of other contemporary writers, is a “sign.

Epic, tragedy, lyric, satire, epigram itself— Martial has tried them all and dropped them, because he feels himself beaten by Tucca. This is not fair; let Tucca leave him at least one kind, the kind that he doesn't care for. It is not fanciful, surely, to find a critique of poetical polypragmatism here also.

As to the monotheistic attitude of Alkmaeon, this is not very surprising, for he was a Pythagoreon, also a mystic with pantheistic tendencies, adhering firmly to the oneness of the whole existence and was known as a bitter and avowed enemy of polytheism and polypragmatism — the belief that nature has various creative forces.

Its prima facie presence can be immediately grasped in the controlled critical judgments of a Polybius or a Plutarch or a Sophocles attempting to penetrate to the causes of the most dense phenomenon, human polypragmatism. It is present in equal measure in Demosthenes' oration, "On the Crown," and in the Roman Pantheon, where the syntax of word and stone is stretched into ever larger and more complex architectonic units with such ease and skill and daring that the spectator can move effortlessly from part to whole and back again without either moral or aesthetic vertigo.

Word Forms

• polypragmatisms

Related Words

When Should You Use Polypragmatism?

Use polypragmatism when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.

Practice This Word

Frequently Asked Questions