I was encouraged to read in the Introduction that it treated philosophy of medicine as part of the philosophy of science. But I was a little sceptical on reading that as such it is comprehensive. Couldn’t a comprehensive account be written only by an amazing polymath? But it turns out that you are that amazing polymath. You seem to have read everything and succeeded in producing an encyclopedia of all the issues. It will establish itself as an essential guide to the field. Professor Jonathan Glover
Medical practice is practiced morality, and clinical research belongs to normative ethics. The present book elucidates and advances this thesis by: 1. analyzing the structure of medical language, knowledge, and theories; 2. inquiring into the foundations of the clinical encounter; 3. introducing the logic and methodology of clinical decision-making, including artificial intelligence in medicine; 4. suggesting comprehensive theories of organism, life, and psyche; of health, illness, and disease; of etiology, diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, and therapy; and 5. investigating the moral and metaphysical issues central to medical practice and research. Many systems of (classical, modal, non-classical, probability, and fuzzy) logic are introduced and applied. Fuzzy medical deontics, fuzzy medical ontology, fuzzy medical concept formation, fuzzy medical decision-making and biomedicine and many other techniques of fuzzification in medicine are introduced for the first time.
Evidence-based medicine (EBM) has become a required element of clinical practice, but it is critical for the healthcare community to understand the ongoing controversy surrounding EBM. Seeking to address questions raised by critics, The Philosophy of Evidence-based Medicine challenges the over dependency of EBM on randomized controlled trials. This book also explores EBM methodology and its relationship with other approaches used in medicine.
How is medical knowledge made? New methods for research and clinical care have reshaped the practices of medical knowledge production over the last forty years. Consensus conferences, evidence-based medicine, translational medicine, and narrative medicine are among the most prominent new methods. Making Medical Knowledge explores their origins and aims, their epistemic strengths, and their epistemic weaknesses. Miriam Solomon argues that the familiar dichotomy between the art and the science of medicine is not adequate for understanding this plurality of methods. The book begins by tracing the development of medical consensus conferences, from their beginning at the United States' National Institutes of Health in 1977, to their widespread adoption in national and international contexts. It discusses consensus conferences as social epistemic institutions designed to embody democracy and achieve objectivity. Evidence-based medicine, which developed next, ranks expert consensus at the bottom of the evidence hierarchy, thus challenging the authority of consensus conferences. Evidence-based medicine has transformed both medical research and clinical medicine in many positive ways, but it has also been accused of creating an intellectual hegemony that has marginalized crucial stages of scientific research, particularly scientific discovery. Translational medicine is understood as a response to the shortfalls of both consensus conferences and evidence-based medicine. Narrative medicine is the most prominent recent development in the medical humanities. Its central claim is that attention to narrative is essential for patient care. Solomon argues that the differences between narrative medicine and the other methods have been exaggerated, and offers a pluralistic account of how the all the methods interact and sometimes conflict. The result is both practical and theoretical suggestions for how to improve medical knowledge and understand medical controversies.
This volume, which has developed from the Fourteenth Trans Disciplinary Symposium on Philosophy and Medicine, September 5-8, 1982, at Tel Aviv University, Israel, contains the contributions of a group of distinguished scholars who together examine the ethical issues raised by the advance of biomedical science and technology. We are, of course, still at the beginning of a revolution in our understanding of human biology; scientific medicine and clinical research are scarcely one hundred years old. Both the sciences and the technology of medicine until ten or fifteen years ago had the feeling of the 19th century about them; we sense that they belonged to an older time; that era is ending. The next twenty-five to fifty years of investigative work belong to neurobiology, genetics, and reproductive biology. The technologies of information processing and imaging will make diagnosis and treatment almost incomprehensible by my generation of physicians. Our science and technology will become so powerful that we shall require all of the art and wisdom we can muster to be sure that they remain dedicated, as Francis Bacon hoped four centuries ago, "to the uses of life." It is well that, as philosophers and physicians, we grapple with the issues now when they are relatively simple, and while the pace of change is relatively slow. We require a strategy for the future; that strategy must be worked out by scientists, philosophers, physicians, lawyers, theologians, and, I should like to add, artists and poets.
Medical nihilism is the view that we should have little confidence in the effectiveness of medical interventions. Jacob Stegenga argues persuasively that this is how we should see modern medicine, and suggests that medical research must be modified, clinical practice should be less aggressive, and regulatory standards should be enhanced.
This book moves away from the frameworks that have traditionally guided ethical decision-making in the Western clinical setting, towards an inclusive, non-coercive and, reflective dialogic approach to moral decision-making. Inspired in part by Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory of morality and principles of communicative action, the book offers a proportionist approach as a way of balancing out the wisdom in traditional frameworks, set in the actual reality of the clinical situation at hand. Putting this approach into practice requires having a conversation, a dialogue or a discourse, with collaboration amongst all the stakeholders. The aim of the dialogue is to reach consensus in the decision, via mutual understanding of the values held by the patient and others whom they see as significant. This book aims to underscore the moral philosophical foundations for having a meaningful conversation. Life and Death Decision in the Clinical Setting is especially relevant in our contemporary era, characterised medically by an ever-increasing armamentarium of life-sustaining technology, but also by increasing multiculturalism, a multiplicity of faiths, and increasing value pluralism.
Beyond Clinical Dehumanisation Toward the Other in Community Mental Health Care offers a rare and intimate portrayal of the moral process of a mental health clinician that interrogates the intractable problem of systemic dehumanisation in community mental health care and looks to the notion of "wonder" and the visionary relational ethics of Emmanuel Levinas for a possible cure. An interdisciplinary study with transdisciplinary aspirations, this book contributes an original and compelling voice to the emerging therapeutic conversation attempting to re-imagine and transcend the objectifying constraints of the dominant discourse and the reductive world view that drives it. Chapters bring into dialogue the fields of community mental health care, psychology, psychology and the Other, the philosophy of wonder, Levinasian ethics, clinical ethics, the moral research of autoethnography and the medical humanities, to consider the defilement of the vulnerable help seeker, the moral injury of the clinician and look for answers beyond. This book is an ethical primer for mental health professionals, researchers, educators, advocates and service users working to re-imagine and heal a broken system by challenging the underpinnings of entrenched dehumanisation and standing with those they "serve".
Bonnie Steinbock presents the authoritative, state-of-the-art guide to current issues in bioethics, covering 30 topics in original essays by some of the world's leading figures in the field, as well as by some newer 'up-and-comers'. Anyone who wants to know how the central debates in bioethics have developed in recent years, and where the debates are going, will want to consult this book.
Jungian psychology has taken a noticeable political turn in the recent years, and analysts and academics whose work draws on Jung’s ideas have made internationally recognised contributions in many humanitarian, communal and political contexts. This book brings together a multidisciplinary and international selection of contributors, all of whom have track records as activists, to discuss some of the most compelling issues in contemporary politics. Analysis and Activism is presented in six parts: Section One, Interventions, includes discussion of what working outside the consulting room means, and descriptions of work with displaced children in Colombia, projects for migrants in Italy and of an analyst’s engagement in the struggles of indigenous Australians. Section Two, Equalities and Inequalities, tackles topics ranging from the collapse of care systems in the UK to working with victims of torture. Section Three, Politics and Modernity, looks at the struggles of native people in Guatemala and Canada and oral history interviews with members of the Chinese/Vietnamese diaspora. Section Four, Culture and Identity, studies issues of race and class in Brazil, feminism and the gendered imagination, and the introduction of Obamacare in the USA. Section Five, Cultural Phantoms, examines the continuing trauma of the Cultural Revolution in China, Jung’s relationship with Jews and Judaism, and German-Jewish dynamics. Finally, Section Six, Nature: Truth and Reconciliation, looks at our broken connection to nature, town and country planning, and relief work after the 2011 earthquake in Japan. There remains throughout the book an acknowledgement that the project of thinking forward the political in Jungian psychology can be problematic, given Jung’s own questionable political history. What emerges is a radical and progressive Jungian approach to politics informed by the spirit of the times as well as by the spirit of the depths. This cutting-edge collection will be essential reading for Jungian and post-Jungian academics and analysts, psychotherapists, counsellors and psychologists, and academics and students of politics, sociology, psychosocial studies and cultural studies.
