China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Practising general practice/family medicine
Published in Joachim P Sturmberg, Carmel M Martin, The Foundations of Primary Care, 2018
Joachim P Sturmberg, Carmel M Martin
The Aristotelian concept of phronesis refers to the notion of practical wisdom. Practical clinical wisdom is gained by experience in the context of the individual consultation.6 It requires more than just arriving at a diagnosis, it requires personal insights, and it requires discourse between patient and doctor. Phronesis requires a commitment to oneself, being critical about ones knowledge, skills and performance, as much as it requires ones commitment to understanding the patient. The accelerating commercialisation and bureaucratisation of health care are major threats to practising medicine wisely; the new language has become the tool to threaten and to change our mental mindsets.6,91
The Greeks had a word for it
Published in Roger Neighbour, Jamie Hynes, Iona Heath, The Inner Physician, 2018
Roger Neighbour, Jamie Hynes, Iona Heath
Phronesis is one of those things more easily recognised than defined. If we must have a definition, I quite like the oxymoronic ‘knowing what to do when nobody knows what to do’, which seems to capture the paradox inherent in a feature of clinical practice that is commonplace yet mysterious. One essential component of phronesis is to have a solid base of factual knowledge at one’s command; in Johari terms, the doctor’s ‘public’ quadrant of medical resources needs to be well stocked. The other is, in situations of uncertainty, somehow to be able to sniff out the key decision-affecting factors that hardnosed logic alone cannot identify. Phronesis arises from the creative interplay between the rational and the intuitive.
Practitioner research, practical wisdom and teaching
Published in David Carr, Cultivating Moral Character and Virtue in Professional Practice, 2018
Still, the educational use of such Aristotelian concepts as phronesis and praxis is not unproblematic. As Kinsella and Pitman (2012, p. 3) note, ‘We do not live in Aristotle’s world’, and ‘we cannot see the world as Aristotle saw it’. This suggests a need to be cautious about projects that try to apply Aristotle’s ideas to modern circumstances. This is why contemporary philosophers of Aristotelian persuasion have criticised some recent educational applications of such concepts as phronesis and praxis as little more than unhelpful distortions of them (see, for example, Kristjánsson (2007).
Learning occupational therapy practice using standardised patients in a practical examination – experiences of students and teachers
Published in Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, 2023
Christina Turesson, Annika Lindh Falk
In the final category, teachers’ and students’ experiences in the present study recognised the practical examination as a motivation for the students to practice their professional skills and to be better prepared for clinical placement. This is concurrent with Giesbrecht, Wener, & Pereira [20], who described using SPs as most beneficial in an early stage of education as preparation for clinical practice. The concept phronesis can be used for describing learning of professional expertise. Phronesis refers to having wisdom to know how to act in different situations, and to make principle-based decisions about what is right; it demands engagement and critical reflection in a specific situation [21]. The concept of phronesis can be applied to the present study in relation to the teachers’ description of the examination as a bridge between theory and practice. Using SPs may add the dimension of learning phronesis since each student was required to interact with an SP and relate specific knowledge and skills to the SP and make clinical decisions appropriate for that individual.
An integrative review of the qualities of a ‘good’ physiotherapist
Published in Physiotherapy Theory and Practice, 2023
Michelle J. Kleiner, Elizabeth Anne Kinsella, Maxi Miciak, Gail Teachman, Erin McCabe, David M. Walton
Practical wisdom, an intellectual virtue that Aristotle called phronesis (Kemmis, 2012), is theorized as central to good professional practice (Kinsella and Pitman, 2012). A wise person, or phronimos, reasons and acts in ways that are right for the human good and that contribute to human flourishing (Jenkins, Kinsella, and DeLuca, 2019; Kinsella and Pitman, 2012; Sellman, 2009). For Sellman (2009), “the professional phronimos … is generally disposed to care deeply about all things to do with providing safe and effective care in ways that enable … the flourishing of patients.” Virtue ethics, which encompass a person’s character and doing the right thing, have underpinned studies on being a ‘good’ nurse (Catlett and Lovan, 2011; Smith and Godfrey, 2002). An ethic of care has been proposed to underscore ‘good’ occupational therapy practice (Wright-St Clair, 2001). Physicians study and debate the appropriate marriage of applied science and humanism to understand what makes a ‘good’ doctor (Hurwitz and Vass, 2002; O’Donnabhain and Friedman, 2018). This latter call aligns with similar propositions from Rutberg, Kostenius, and Öhrling’s (2013) exploration of physiotherapy practice and Fadyl, McPherson, and Kayes’ (2011) interpretation of ‘good-quality’ care; in which both studies call for a “balance between technical competence and humanness” (Kayes and McPherson, 2012) as foundational to good physiotherapy practice.
Palliative Psychiatry for Severe and Enduring Anorexia Nervosa Includes but Goes beyond Harm Reduction
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2021
Anna L. Westermair, Daniel Z. Buchman, Sarah Levitt, Manuel Trachsel
While honesty, transparency, trustworthiness, and integrity should be among the virtues of any healthcare professional, here we comment briefly on the intellectual virtues of humility, compassion, and phronesis. Humility is how we reflect and acknowledge our own limitations; an acknowledgment of the boundary of the content expert domain of psychiatry as well as fallibility (Buchman, Ho, and Goldberg 2017). For instance, this could mean acknowledging the current limits of psychiatry’s ability to ‘cure’ SEAN for some patients. Compassion acknowledges that suffering is common to the human experience and responding compassionately can help alleviate suffering. When healthcare professionals are attuned to the suffering of their patients with SEAN, they remain in solidarity with them to help reduce their suffering. Healthcare professionals persist despite the recognition that personal recovery can be a series of successes and relapses. Aristotle’s phronesis, commonly translated to practical wisdom, is a cardinal virtue that refers to the ability to draw upon knowledge specific to the situation, to discern, and to do the right thing (Aristotle 2009). For palliative psychiatry, phronesis might mean knowing how to deliberate and engage with the patient with SEAN and helping them to determine what ends matter most and how that can be achieved skillfully (Radden and Sadler 2008).