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.

Vulnerability as a key concept in relational patient- centered professionalism
This article pursue two objectives. First, I focus on understanding and making visible shared vulnerability that arises in clinical settings from a triple perspective: patient and family, health professionals, and institutions. Second, to address this challenge for professionalism, in this paper I articulate the term"relational centered-patient professionalism", which has two main axes. The relational approach means taking into account how the relationships among professionals, patients and institutions determine the constitution and evolution of those professional values. The focus on patient centered care is in...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - January 10, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Why visiting one ’s ageing mother is not enough: on filial duties to prevent and alleviate parental loneliness
AbstractAs people grow old, many risk becoming chronically lonely which is associated with e.g. depression, dementia, and increased mortality. Whoever else should help to protect them from this risk, various philosophers have argued that any children that they might have will often be among them. Proceeding on this assumption, this article considers what filial duties to protect ageing parents from loneliness consist of, or might consist of. I develop my answer by showing that a view that may be intuitively plausible, namely that they simply require children to visit their ageing parents regularly when they can do so at re...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - January 8, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Biological normativity: a new hope for naturalism?
AbstractSince Boorse [Philos Sci 44(4):542 –573, 1977] published his paper “Health as a theoretical concept” one of the most lively debates within philosophy of medicine has been on the question of whether health and disease are in some sense ‘objective’ and ‘value-free’ or ‘subjective’ and ‘value-laden’. Due to the app arent ‘failure’ of pure naturalist, constructivist, or normativist accounts, much in the recent literature has appealed to more conciliatory approaches or so-called ‘hybrid accounts’ of health and disease. A recent paper by Matthewson and Griffiths [J Med Philos 42(4):447–466...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - January 4, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

When do caregivers ignore the veil of ignorance? An empirical study on medical triage decision –making
This study empirically examined the influence of value-oriented considerations on medical triage decision–making. Participants were asked to prioritize medical treatment relating to four case scenarios of an emergency situation resulting from a car collision. The cases differ b y situational characteristics pertaining to the at-fault driver, which were related to culpability attribution.In three case scenarios most participants gave priority to the most severely injured individual, unless the less severely injured individual was their brother. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of a vehicle-ramming terror attack most partici...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - January 4, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Withdrawing critical care from patients in a triage situation
AbstractThe advent of COVID-19 has been the occasion for a renewed interest in the principles governing triage when the number of critically ill patients exceeds the healthcare infrastructure ’s capacity in a given location. Some scholars advocate that it would be morally acceptable in a crisis to withdraw resources like life support and ICU beds from one patient in favor of another, if, in the judgment of medical personnel, the other patient has a significantly better prognosis. The p aper examines the arguments for and against this approach from the point of view of natural law theory, especially using the principle of...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - January 4, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Do we need the criminalization of medical fake news?
AbstractUncontrolled access to information on the Internet has many advantages, but it also leads to the phenomenon of fake news. Fake news is dangerous in many spheres, including that of health. For example, we are facing an increase in the amount of vaccine hesitancy. This has been w considered by the World Health Organization in 2019 as one of the greatest threats to public health. This specific phenomenon is linked with the spread of information on the Internet around that issue. In this paper, I discuss a proposition of new crime, which has the aim of fighting medical fake news by stopping its spread. This proposition...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - January 4, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

The group home as moral laboratory: tracing the ethic of autonomy in Dutch intellectual disability care
AbstractThis paper examines the prevalence of the ideal of “independence” in intellectual disability care in the Netherlands. It responds to a number of scholars who have interrogated this ideal through the lens of Michel Foucault’s vocabulary of governmentality. Such analyses hold that the goal of “becoming independent” subjects people with intel lectual disabilities to various constraints and limitations that ensure their continued oppression. As a result, these authors contend, the commitment to the ideal of “independence” – the “ethic of autonomy” – actually threatens to become an obstacle to flou...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - January 4, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

The personalized medicine discourse: archaeology and genealogy
In conclusion, if the definition of “personalization” in medicine is not clear, patients might get wrong expectations about what is achievable for their health. Therefore, epistemological trends should not be separated as they drive same goals: providing accurate diagnosis and treatments based on large data to predict disease prog ression. (Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy)
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - January 3, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Evaluating the effectiveness of clinical ethics committees: a systematic review
AbstractClinical Ethics Committees (CECs), as distinct from Research Ethics Committees, were originally established with the aim of supporting healthcare professionals in managing controversial clinical ethical issues. However, it is still unclear whether they manage to accomplish this task and what is their impact on clinical practice. This systematic review aims to collect available assessments of CECs ’ performance as reported in literature, in order to evaluate CECs’ effectiveness. We retrieved all literature published up to November 2019 in six databases (PubMed, Ovid MEDLINE, Scopus, Philosopher’s Index, Embase...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - November 21, 2020 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Optimizing peer review to minimize the risk of retracting COVID-19-related literature
AbstractRetractions of COVID-19 literature in both preprints and the peer-reviewed literature serve as a reminder that there are still challenging issues underlying the integrity of the biomedical literature. The risks to academia become larger when such retractions take place in high-ranking biomedical journals. In some cases, retractions result from unreliable or nonexistent data, an issue that could easily be avoided by having open data policies, but there have also been retractions due to oversight in peer review and editorial verification. As COVID-19 continues to affect academics and societies around the world, failu...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - November 20, 2020 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Back to WHAT? The role of research ethics in pandemic times
AbstractThe Covid-19 pandemic creates an unprecedented threatening situation worldwide with an urgent need for critical reflection and new knowledge production, but also a need for imminent action despite prevailing knowledge gaps and multilevel uncertainty. With regard to the role of research ethics in these pandemic times some argue in favor of exceptionalism, others, including the authors of this paper, emphasize the urgent need to remain committed to core ethical principles and fundamental human rights obligations all reflected in research regulations and guidelines carefully crafted over time. In this paper we disenta...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - November 3, 2020 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Is routine prenatal screening and testing fundamentally incompatible with a commitment to reproductive choice? Learning from the historical context
AbstractAn enduring ethical dispute accompanies prenatal screening and testing (PST) technologies. This ethical debate focuses on notions of reproductive choice. On one side  of the dispute are those who have supported PST as a way to empower women’s reproductive choice, while on the other side are those who argue that PST, particularly when made a routine part of prenatal care, limits deliberate choice. Empirical research does not resolve this ethical debate with evidence both of women for whom PST enhances their choices but also persistent evidence of recurrent problems between PST and women’s autonomous deci...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - October 30, 2020 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Social dignity for marginalized people in public healthcare: an interpretive review and building blocks for a non-ideal theory
This article focuses on the social dignity of people marginalized by mental illness, substance abuse and comparable conditions in extramural settings. 35 studies published between 2007 and 2017 have addressed this issue, most of them identifying norms for social dignity: civilized interactions, non-stigmatizing treatment, treatment as unique individuals, being taken seriously, maintaining a positive identity, experiencing independence, relating to others, and participating in daily life. We argue that these norms belong to ideal theory, whereas we agree with Robeyns (Social Theory and Practice  34:341–362, 2008) and oth...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - October 27, 2020 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Committing to endangerment: medical teams in the age of corona in Jewish ethics
This article offers answers to these questions by citing opinions based on Jewish ethical thought that has been formulated down through the ages. According to Jewish ethics, the obligation to assist and care for patients is based on many commandments found in the Bible and on rulings in the Responsa literature. The ethical challenge is created when treating the sick represents a real existential danger to the caregivers and their families. This consideration is relevant for all dangerous infectious diseases and particularly for the coronavirus that has struck around the world and for which there is as yet no cure. Many rab...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - October 19, 2020 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Resilience beyond reductionism: ethical and social dimensions of an emerging concept in the neurosciences
AbstractSince a number of years, popular and scientific interest in resilience is rapidly increasing. More recently, also neuroscientific research in resilience and the associated neurobiological findings is gaining more attention. Some of these neuroscientific findings might open up new measures to foster personal resilience, ranging from magnetic stimulation to pharmaceutical interventions and awareness-based techniques. Therefore, bioethics should also take a closer look at resilience and resilience research, which are today philosophically under-theorized. In this paper, we analyze different conceptualizations of resil...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - October 12, 2020 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research