About the state and perspectives of anthropometric researches in the medical anatomy

One of the notable events of recent years in the field of homeland human morphology was the unification of the research areas of two sciences - medical anatomy and physical or biological anthropology, which are far from fully consistent with each other, have different histories and different conceptual and methodological bases - into one scientific specialty. Despite this, the research areas of both sciences also have much in common. The future of their research field, the development of the united scientific specialty and, accordingly, the development of morphological research in our country as a whole depend on how this common will determine their unification, what it will be filled with in content. The main goal of the article is to analyze the reasons for the continuing low efficiency of numerous and large-scale anthropometric studies on body typology, carried out by medical anatomists in the country over the past two decades. This thesis is far from new and its relevance and urgency was especially emphasized by the author six years ago at the eighth congress of the Russian national anatomical society (SMSAHE) in the plenary report. Until now, these studies have not brought the expected effect either in the field of the reliable factual basis of theoretical concepts of human morphology, or in scientific or clinical practice. The conceptual basis of this kind of research is the doctrine of the constitution, the limitations, deficiency and incompleteness of which are now clearly and directly indicated even in the relevant methodological recommendations of the Ministry of Health of the Russia, and not only in scientific articles, does not allow the authors of such studies to obtain results that are significantly important for science and practice. Moreover, they are mostly unknown or little known to physical anthropologists, who at the same time are simultaneously conducting similar studies on much smaller but carefully selected groups and populations with the more substantiated conclusions. It has been shown that the bias of anthropometric studies by medical anatomists towards human body typing schemes based on the analysis of its component composition or mixed schemes does not meet the goals and objectives of medical anatomy, which is called upon to solve problems of individual variability of organs and systems on a different basis. The practical recommendations of these studies contained in anatomical dissertations do not and will not meet the real needs of the clinic. In order for the indicated point of intersection of the research field of medical anatomy and physical anthropology - human body typology, which has now accumulated a huge amount of data on a variety of ethno-territorial, age and other criteria groups of the population, to finally bring real practical benefit, analytics of a fundamentally new information level and new conceptual approaches are needed. Without such an appropriately methodologically substantiated analysis, no matter from what position it is undertaken, the information obtained in a huge number of dissertational (and not only) studies will remain in the form of numerous ascertaining digital databases, reflecting only the effect of the phenomenon of «medicalization» of anthropometric evidence.