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.

Genomics governance: advancing justice, fairness and equity through the lens of the African communitarian ethic of Ubuntu
AbstractThere is growing interest for a communitarian approach to the governance of genomics, and for  such governance to be grounded in principles of justice, equity and solidarity. However, there is a near absence of conceptual studies on how communitarian-based principles, or values, may inform, support or guide the governance of genomics research. Given that solidarity is a key principle in U buntu, an African communitarian ethic and theory of justice, there is emerging interest about the extent to which Ubuntu could offer guidance for the governance of genomics research in Africa. To this effect, we undertook a co...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - April 2, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Vulnerability in light of the COVID-19 crisis
(Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy)
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - April 1, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Cultivating quality awareness in corona times
AbstractThe Covid-19 pandemic is a tragedy for those who have been hard hit worldwide. At the same time, it is also a test of concepts and practices of what good care is and requires, and how quality of care can be accounted for. In this paper, we present our Care-Ethical Model of Quality  Enquiry (CEMQUE) and apply it to the case of residential care for older people in the Netherlands during the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead of thinking about care in healthcare and social welfare as a set of separate care acts, we think about care as a complex practice of relational caring, crossed by other practices. Instead of thinking ab...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - March 31, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

A re-evaluation of the modern psychiatric hospital from the standpoint of the Kyoto school ’s critique of modernity
This article will discuss such consequences, in particular the mechanization of human life derived from the excesses of scientific technology, in the service of introducing a new way of thinking about the limits of psychiatric treatment in today’s world. (Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy)
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - March 30, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Aging and the prudential lifespan account
AbstractAs individuals grow older, they usually require assistance with the daily tasks of self-care. This type of assistance, ancillary care, is essential to maintaining the health of those who need these services. In his prudential lifespan account, Norman Daniels includes access to such services making his account an attractive proposal given the current demographic shift. In this paper, I examine the prudential lifespan account through the lens of old age and I focus on the two concepts on which the lifespan account relies. I show that these two concepts, normal species functioning and opportunity cannot buttress Danie...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - March 28, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Nudging to donate organs: do what you like or like what we do?
AbstractAn effective method to increase the number of potential cadaveric organ donors is to make people donors by default with the option to opt out. This non-coercive public policy tool to influence people ’s choices is often justified on the basis of theas-judged-by-themselves principle: people are nudged into choosing what they themselves truly want. We review three often hypothesized reasons for why defaults work and argue that theas-judged-by-themselves principle may hold only in two of these cases. We specify further conditions for when the principle can hold in these cases and show that whether those conditions a...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - March 17, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

From hostile worlds to multiple spheres: towards a normative pragmatics of justice for the Googlization of health
This article seeks to outline the limitations of this common framing for critically understanding the phenomenon of the Googlization of health. In particular, the mobilizati on of a diversity of non-market value statements in the justification work carried out by actors involved in the Googlization of health indicates the co-presence of additional worlds or spheres in this context, which are not captured by the market vs. non-market dichotomy. It then advances an altern ative framework, based on a multiple-sphere ontology that draws on Boltanski and Thevenot’s orders of worth and Michael Walzer’s theory of justice, whi...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - March 15, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Towards a pragmatist dealing with algorithmic bias in medical machine learning
AbstractMachine Learning (ML) is on the rise in medicine, promising improved diagnostic, therapeutic and prognostic clinical tools. While these technological innovations are bound to transform health care, they also bring new ethical concerns to the forefront. One particularly elusive challenge regards discriminatory algorithmic judgements based on biases inherent in the training data. A common line of reasoning distinguishes between justified differential treatments that mirror true disparities between socially salient groups, and unjustified biases which do not, leading to misdiagnosis and erroneous treatment. In the cur...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - March 13, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Healing time: the experience of body and temporality when coping with illness and incapacity
This article suggests that the structures of lived embodiment, as explored by phenomenology, provide a way to understand the modes of wholeness individuals access over time, and in relation to time —what is here termedchronic healing. (Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy)
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - February 18, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

What is the appropriate role of reason in secular clinical ethics? An argument for a compatibilist view of public reason
This article describes and rejects three standard views of reason in secular clinical ethics. The first, instrumental reason view, affirms that reason may be used to draw conceptual distinctions, map moral geography, and identify invalid forms of argumentation, but prohibits recommendations because reason cannot justifyany content-full moral or metaphysical commitments. The second, public reason view, affirms instrumental reason, and claims ethicists may make recommendations grounded in the moral and metaphysical commitments of bioethical consensus. The third, comprehensive reason view, also affirms instrumental reason, bu...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - January 21, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Is human enhancement intrinsically bad?
This article evaluates the related  claims about the intrinsic badness of HET by looking into philosophical theories of intrinsic value. It investigates how well-established conceptions of intrinsic value map onto typical bioconservative arguments about HET's intrinsic badness. Three predominant variants of these arguments are explo red and found wanting: (i) HET are intrinsically bad owing to their unnaturalness; (ii) the pursuit of HET reveals intrinsically bad character (“the desire for mastery”); and (iii) HET will necessarily undermine intrinsically valuable things (e.g., human dignity). My analysis shows that th...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - January 18, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

COVID-19 and the ethics of human challenge trials
(Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy)
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - January 17, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

The poetics of vulnerability: creative writing among young adults in treatment for psychosis in light of Ricoeur ’s and Kristeva’s philosophy of language and subjectivity
AbstractThere is a growing interest in the application of creative writing in the treatment of mental illness. Nonpharmacological approaches have shown that access to poetic, creative language can allow for the verbalisation of illness experiences, as well as for self-expressions that can include other facets of the subject outside of the disease. In particular, creative writing in a safe group context has proven to be of particular importance. In this article, we present a pilot on a creative writing group for young adults in treatment for psychosis. We set the texts and experiences from the writing group in dialogue with...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - January 16, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Harming patients by provision of intensive care treatment: is it right to provide time-limited trials of intensive care to patients with a low chance of survival?
AbstractTime-limited trials of intensive care have arisen in response to the increasing demand for intensive care treatment for patients with a low chance of surviving their critical illness, and the clinical uncertainty inherent in intensive care decision-making. Intensive care treatment is reported by most patients to be a significantly unpleasant experience. Therefore, patients who do not survive intensive care treatment are exposed to a negative dying experience. Time-limited trials of intensive care treatment in patients with a low chance of surviving have both a small chance of benefiting this patient group and a hig...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - January 15, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

The hamster wheel: a case study on embodied narrative identity and overcoming severe obesity
AbstractBased in narrative phenomenology, this article describes an example of how lived time, self and bodily engagement with the social world intertwine, and how our sense of self develops. We explore this through the life story of a woman who lost weight through surgery in the 1970  s and has fought against her own body, food and eating ever since. Our narrative analysis of interviews, reflective notes and email correspondence disentangled two storylines illuminating paradoxes within this long-term weight loss process.Thea ’s Medical Weight Narrative: From Severely Obese Child to Healthy Adult is her story in context...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - January 13, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research