The patient's expectations, wishes, judgments, and opinions have recently become a topic of interest in medical research. This is partly due to the physician's increasing awareness of an inadequate impact of medical measures, be they preventive, informative, or even curative, on the patient and the general public. It may also be partly due to an increasing criticism on the part of the patient and the general public of the failure of the medical service to respond adequately to the information provided. Consequently, there has recently been increased interest in gaining knowledge about the social aspects of human life relevant to medicine. The measures for securing validity, however, are the traditional rules of reductionist methodology. The author argues that by exploring the domain of culturally constructed meaning with tools based on naturalistic epistemology, the knowledge obtained will be invalid.