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Introduction
Published in Sridhar Venkatapuram, Alex Broadbent, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Public Health, 2023
Alex Broadbent, Sridhar Venkatapuram
Health and disease receive considerable attention in philosophy of medicine, and they are also important in philosophy of public health. In Chapter 4, Benjamin Smart guides us through the issues that arise in applying health-properties to populations. Smart sets out a number of analyses of the concepts of health and disease, and then tests their applicability at both organism and population levels. And he goes further, proposing a notion of health that can literally (not metaphorically) be applied to populations, as well as to individual organisms, namely, human beings.
Connecting philosophy of medicine with feminist bioethics
Published in Wendy A. Rogers, Jackie Leach Scully, Stacy M. Carter, Vikki A. Entwistle, Catherine Mills, The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Bioethics, 2022
The proper understanding of the concepts of health, illness and disease is a longstanding area of research in philosophy of medicine. An additional concept, sickness, has been more frequently discussed by sociologists, and is also central to work on a number of topics in bioethics. While there has been, to my knowledge, no explicitly feminist analysis of these concepts, they (and the relationships among them) feature implicitly in a number of topics investigated by feminist bioethicists. Moreover, feminist approaches to bioethics aim to draw our attention to inequities in health and healthcare related to sex, gender or, increasingly, other social categories; it is therefore important to have theories of health and illness that are adequate to these goals.
The Concept of Health
Published in Dien Ho, A Philosopher Goes to the Doctor, 2019
In the current philosophy of medicine literature, there are two broad approaches to defining health: health is either a value-free or a value-laden concept. For the first approach, one might define health on the basis of some objective, biological, or statistical facts about us. For instance, one might say that a person is healthy if and only if her physiology is functioning in a manner typical of our species. The basic idea of this approach is that we can define the concept of health using only scientific concepts and descriptions. According to proponents of this approach, health is a purely biological notion.3
Philotechnia and philanthropia
Published in Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings, 2022
William Osler summarized his philosophy of medicine and life in two words: philotechnia and philantropia, “love of the art” and “love of humanity.”7 It is a virtue ethic where the physician’s moral obligation is to act in the best interest of the patient. For Osler and the English medical ethicists Gregory and Percival, this was a noblesse oblige, a paternalistic code.8 The patient is dependent on the character, trustworthiness, moral sensitivity, and willingness of the physician to spend time and resources for his or her benefit. It is a wonderful aspirational goal but rarely met in the past or the present. Reaching the ideal patient-centered relationship has been elusive for many reasons, including the electronic medical record, the categorization of the patient as a consumer, the overuse of testing, and reimbursement for office visits. Philotechnia is clearly suffering and often glossed over or brushed aside. There needs to be a better appreciation of the importance of doctor-patient communication as part of the evidence-based science of medicine, with emphasis on studying what approach is best for each individual patient and teaching these techniques, not as a palliative, but as therapy to improve the patient’s well-being, compliance, and response to therapy.
Patrick Romanell, William Osler, and philosophy in medicine
Published in Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings, 2022
In 1913, Osler delivered the Silliman Lectures at Yale University on “The Evolution of Modern Medicine.”1 The lectures were collected and printed and demonstrate the extensiveness of Osler’s knowledge relative to the history of medicine. In these lectures, he touches on a philosophy of medicine and the relationship of philosophy to medicine. In chapter 2 (Hippocrates and Hippocratic Writings), Osler states, “We have seen that the primitive man and in the great civilizations of Egypt and Babylonia, the physician evolved from the priest—in Greece he had a dual origin, philosophy and religion.” Subsequently, Osler goes on to note Plato’s statement, “In the Phaedrus, in reply to a question of Socrates whether the nature of the soul could be known intelligently without knowing the nature of the whole, Phaedrus replies: ‘Hippocrates, the Asclepiad says that the nature, even of the body, can only be understood as a whole.’” Thus, the implication is that the nature of the whole of man may go beyond the physical nature that we can detect.
Enriching, Rather than Revising, the Conceptual Toolbox on Germline Interventions
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2020
The infamous case of He Jiankui provides an illustration of this. While his ultimate goal was therapeutic (to prevent future HIV infection in the twin girls), the path he chose toward that goal was to seek to induce what can plausibly be regarded an enhancement, since a lack of natural immunity to HIV does not count as pathological or “abnormal” functioning. (While the proper delineation of the domain of the “pathological” remains a contested issue in the philosophy of medicine, at the practical level we can nonetheless gain much guidance on this from the current state of medical science.) We can thus regard He as having attempted a germline intervention of a hybrid nature, a “preventive enhancement”—with some speculation that it may have been accompanied, intentionally or not, by a “pure” enhancement of memory ability (Regalado 2019).1