Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

To be alive when dying: moral catharsis and hope in patients with limited life prognosis
AbstractThe Stoics considered that in order to die well, one must previously have lived (well) and not merely existed, an assertion which will not be contested in this paper. The question raised here is whether an individual whose life expectancy is jeopardized by serious illness or whose life has not been lived to the ‘full’ for whatever reason should have to abandon all hope or, alternately, whether that life could still somehow be saved (in an ethical sense). One clear obstacle to achieving this stems from (bad) moral character, given that moral character is an element which conditions an individual’s mor al behav...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - June 3, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Epistemologies of evidence-based medicine: a plea for corpus-based conceptual research in the medical humanities
AbstractEvidence-based medicine has been the subject of much controversy within and outside the field of medicine, with its detractors characterizing it as reductionist and authoritarian, and its proponents rejecting such characterization as a caricature of the actual practice. At the heart of this controversy is a complex linguistic and social process that cannot be illuminated by appealing to the semantics of the modifierevidence-based. The complexity lies in the nature ofevidence as a basic concept that circulates in both expert and non-expert spheres of communication, supports different interpretations in different con...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - May 31, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Toward a phenomenology of congenital illness: a case of single-ventricle heart disease
AbstractPhenomenology has contributed to healthcare by providing resources for understanding the lived experience of the patient and their situation. But within a burgeoning literature on the characteristic features of illness, there has not yet been an account appropriate to describe congenital illnesses: conditions which are present from birth and cause suffering or medical threat to their bearers. Congenital illness sits uncomfortably with standard accounts in phenomenology of illness, in which concepts such as loss, doubt, alienation and unhomelikeness presuppose prior health. These accounts reflect, in different ways,...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - May 22, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Decision-making approaches in transgender healthcare: conceptual analysis and ethical implications
AbstractOver the past decades, great strides have been made to professionalize and increase access to transgender medicine. As the (biomedical) evidence base grows and conceptualizations regarding gender dysphoria/gender incongruence evolve, so too do ideas regarding what constitutesgood treatment and decision-making in transgender healthcare. Against this background, differing care models arose, including the ‘Standards of Care’ and the so-called ‘Informed Consent Model’. In these care models, ethical notions and principles such as ‘decision-making’ and ‘autonomy’ are often referred to, but left unsubstant...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - May 18, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

On the use of evolutionary mismatch theories in debating human prosociality
AbstractAccording to some evolutionary theorists human prosocial dispositions emerged in a context of inter-group competition and violence that made our psychology parochially prosocial, ie. cooperative towards in-groups and competitive towards strangers. This evolutionary hypothesis is sometimes employed in bioethical debates to argue that human nature and contemporary environments, and especially large-scale societies, aremismatched. In this article we caution against the use of mismatch theories in moral philosophy in general and discuss empirical evidence that puts into question mismatch theories based on parochial pro...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - May 12, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Premature consent and patient duties
AbstractThis paper addresses the problem of ‘premature consent’. The term ‘premature consent’ (introduced in a 2018 paper by J.K. Davis) denotes patient decisions that are: (i) formulated prior to discussion with the appropriate healthcare professional (HCP); (ii) based on information from unreliable sources (e.g. parts of the interne t); and (iii) resolutely maintained despite the HCP having provided alternative reliable information. HCPs are not obliged to respect premature consent patients’ demands for unindicated treatments. But why? What is it that premature consent patients do or get wrong? Davis has argued...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - May 12, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Postcolonial theory and Canada ’s health care professions: bridging the gap
AbstractIn recent years there have been several calls in professional and academic journals for healthcare personnel in Canada to raise the profile of postcolonial theory as a theoretical and explanatory framework for their practice with Indigenous people. In this paper I explore some of the challenges that are likely to confront those healthcare personnel in engaging with postcolonial theory in a training context. I consider these challenges in relation to three areas of conflict. First I consider conflicts around paradigms of knowledge, wherein postcolonial theory operates from a different base from most professional kno...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - May 12, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Correction to: From hostile worlds to multiple spheres: towards a normative pragmatics of justice for the Googlization of health
A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-021-10018-3 (Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy)
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - May 12, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

The harmful-dysfunction account of disorder, individual versus social values, and the interpersonal variability of harm challenge
AbstractThis paper presents theinterpersonal variability of harm challenge to Jerome Wakefield ’s harmful-dysfunction account (HDA) of disorder. This challenge stems from the seeming fact that what promotes well-being or is harmful to someone varies much more across individuals than what is intuitively healthy or disordered. This makes it at least prima facie difficult to see how judgments about health and disorder could, as harm-requiring accounts of disorder like the HDA maintain, be based on, or closely linked to, judgments about well-being and harm. Thisinterpersonal variability of harm challenge is made salient by t...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - May 8, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Dying as an issue of public concern: cultural scripts on palliative care in Sweden
AbstractIn Sweden, palliative care has, over the past decades, been object to policies and guidelines with focus on how to achieve “good palliative care”. The aim of this study has been to analyse how experts make sense of the development and the current state of palliative care. Departing from this aim, focus has been on identifying how personal experiences of ‘the self’ are intertwined with culturally available meta-l evel concepts and how experts contribute to construct new scripts on palliative care. Twelve qualitative interviews were conducted. Four scripts were identified after analysing the empirical materia...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - May 6, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Ricoeur ’s hermeneutic arc and the “narrative turn” in the ethics of care
Abstract“Patient-centred care” is the recent response to the malaise produced in the field of health care from the point of view both of a technical mentality and the paternalistic model. The interest in the story-telling approach shown by both the humanities and the social sciences has favoured a “na rrative turn” in medicine too, where the new ethics of therapeutic relationship consider the hermeneutic method a means by which to integrate evidence and subjectivity, scientific data and patient experience. The aim of this paper is to show how Ricoeur’s theory of “threefold mimesis” makes a conceptual contribu...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - April 29, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Disease diagnosis and treatment; could theranostics change everything?
AbstractThere has always been an intimate and complex relationship between the diagnosis of a disease and its treatment. The approach dubbed theranostics aims to combine diagnostic techniques with therapeutic ones by deploying the same molecule in two roles, exploiting the specificity of its function to render disease treatment more effective. Does this technical development have the potential to change our conception of disease diagnosis? With the treatment approach so intimately linked to the diagnostic tool, might it be possible to treat a disease without having first made an independent clinical or laboratory diagnosis...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - April 28, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

In the name of the family? Against parents ’ refusal to disclose prognostic information to children
AbstractParents frequently attempt to shield their children from distressing prognostic information. Pediatric oncology providers sometimes follow parental request for non-disclosure of prognostic information to children, invoking what we call the stability of the family argument. They believe that if they inform the child about terminal prognosis despite parental wishes, cohesion and family structure will be severely hampered. In this paper, we argue against parental request for non-disclosure. Firstly, we present the stability of the family argument in more detail. We, then, set out the (conceptual, legal, systemic) enti...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - April 13, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Doctor, please make me freer: Capabilities enhancement as a goal of medicine
AbstractBiomedical innovations are making possible the enhancement of human capabilities. There are two philosophical stances on the role that medicine should play in this respect. On the one hand, naturalism rejects every medical intervention that goes beyond preventing and treating disease. On the other hand, welfarism advocates enhancements that foster subjective well-being. We will show that both positions have considerable shortcomings. Consequently, we will introduce a third characterization in which therapies and enhancements can be reconciled with the legitimate objectives of medicine inasmuch as they improve the c...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - April 9, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

On recovery: re-directing the concept by differentiation of its meanings
AbstractRecovery is a commonly used concept in both professional and everyday contexts. Yet despite its extensive use, it has not drawn much philosophical attention. In this paper, I question the common understanding of recovery, show how the concept is inadequate, and introduce new and much needed terminology. I argue that recovery glosses over important distinctions and even misrepresents the process of moving away from malady as"going back" to a former state of health. It does not invite important nuances needed to distinguish between biomedical, phenomenological, and social perspectives. In addition, I claim ...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - April 3, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research