Medical ethics
Keywords:
Medical Ethics, Medicine, Biomedicine, Institutionalized medicine, Standardized medical research, Standardized clinical practice, Health, Disease, Hybridism, Eliminativism, Phenomenology, Purpose of medicine, Moral principles of medicine, Principalism, Applied medical ethics, Historical conception of medicine, Health professionalsSynopsis
Health professionals frequently face situations that require ethical reflection. Quite a few actions-even routine ones-of physicians, biomedical researchers, nurses, physical therapists, pharmacists, clinical psychologists, occupational therapists, laboratory technicians, physician assistants, radiologists, speech therapists, nutritionists, health social workers, and health care administrators can and should be evaluated from an ethical point of view.
Unlike other philosophical questions about medicine-which are infrequently asked by health care professionals-ethical ones give rise to inevitable questions. When faced with a choice of course of action, health professionals weigh reasons, and lean - at least, it would be desirable - to those that they believe carry the most weight, and in doing so follow some guidelines and criteria that are the subject of study in medical ethics.
Now, if you are not a health professional, this little book may be of interest to you as well. Regardless of your age, you will surely have suffered from some illness; it did not have to be a serious one: a cold, the flu, allergies, headaches or sore throats, upset stomachs or skin rashes. While we hope this is not the case for you or any of your family members, many people are afflicted with serious, painful, chronic and disabling illnesses. Our health declines from time to time. Others live unhealthy lifestyles that will at some point have serious repercussions on their health. Questions of health and disease give us food for thought at some point in our lives, when we too will have to ponder reasons, even if we are not experts, for our well-being is one of the things that matters most to us. Thus, philosophical questions about health and illness are not simply philosophical: they are also personal, practical and political.
These pages are the result of a dialogue between an epistemologist and philosopher of science (M.G.), and a moral philosopher (A.M.). The former, although focused on social epistemology, has been working for some time on the philosophy of the special sciences - the philosophy of medicine, in particular; the latter, a specialist in metaethics, has developed an increasing interest in medical ethics. It is for this reason that this book is structured in such a way as to address both fronts, albeit in a particular way.
We begin the book by presenting a very general overview of the nature of medicine: what is medicine, and what is medicine like today (Chapters 1 and 2). The first chapter is historical in nature, and seeks to understand how medicine has been transformed to its present state: biomedicine. It also tries to offer a definition that is faithful to what medicine actually is, without oversimplifying or overcomplicating the issue. The second chapter seeks to give substance to our definition of medicine, focusing on what we believe to be the defining characteristic of its current practice: institutionalization, particularly through the standardization of both medical research and clinical practice. In the third chapter - the only one in which we deal directly with a problem of the philosophy of medicine - we outline current philosophical debates on the concepts of health and disease. We do so, however, not in the abstract, as philosophers of medicine are wont to do, but by attending to the historical context in which medicine has sought and seeks both cure and patient care. The fourth chapter demarcates the field of study of medical ethics and builds on the discussions in the previous chapters to argue that medical ethics must stick to the purposes of medicine. Finally, in the fifth chapter we attempt to show why it is important to talk and discuss medical ethics in today's sociocultural context. Medical ethics has an important role to play in helping health care personnel fulfill the purposes of medicine, in this final chapter we seek to show.
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