The Philosophy and Practice of Medicine and Bioethics

The Philosophy and Practice of Medicine and Bioethics
Author: Barbara Maier
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 556
Release: 2010-11-03
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9048188679
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This book challenges the unchallenged methods in medicine, such as "evidence-based medicine," which claim to be, but often are not, scientific. It completes medical care by adding the comprehensive humanistic perspectives and philosophy of medicine. No specific or absolute recommendations are given regarding medical treatment, moral approaches, or legal advice. Given rather is discussion about each issue involved and the strongest arguments indicated. Each argument is subject to further critical analysis. This is the same position as with any philosophical, medical or scientific view. The argument that decision-making in medicine is inadequate unless grounded on a philosophy of medicine is not meant to include all of philosophy and every philosopher. On the contrary, it includes only sound, practical and humanistic philosophy and philosophers who are creative and critical thinkers and who have concerned themselves with the topics relevant to medicine. These would be those philosophers who engage in practical philosophy, such as the pragmatists, humanists, naturalists, and ordinary-language philosophers. A new definition of our own philosophy of life emerges and it is necessary to have one. Good lifestyle no longer means just abstaining from cigarettes, alcohol and getting exercise. It also means living a holistic life, which includes all of one's thinking, personality and actions. This book also includes new ways of thinking. In this regard the "Metaphorical Method" is explained, used, and exemplified in depth, for example in the chapters on care, egoism and altruism, letting die, etc.

Bioethics as Practice

Bioethics as Practice
Author: Judith Andre
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2003-10-16
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0807861219
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Those who work in bioethics and the medical humanities come from many different backgrounds, such as health care, philosophy, law, the social sciences, and religious studies. The work they do also varies widely: consulting on ethical issues in patient care, working with legislatures, dealing with the media, teaching, speaking, writing and more. Writing as a participant in this developing field, Judith Andre offers a model to unify its diversity. Using the term "bioethics" broadly, to include all the medical humanities, she articulates ideals for the field, identifies its temptations and moral pitfalls, and argues for the central importance of certain virtues. Perhaps the most original of these is the virtue of choosing projects well, which demands not only broadening the field's focus but also understanding the forces that have kept it too narrow. Andre offers an imaginative analysis of the special problems presented by interdisciplinary work and discusses the intellectual virtues necessary for its success. She calls attention to the kinds of professional communities that are necessary to support good work. The book draws from interviews with many people in the field and from the findings of social scientists. It includes the author's personal reflections, several extended allegories, and philosophical analysis.

Ethics and the Metaphysics of Medicine

Ethics and the Metaphysics of Medicine
Author: Kenneth A. Richman
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2004-06-18
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9780262264341
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Explores the philosophical and practical ethical implications of a definition of health as a state that allows us to reach our goals. Definitions of health and disease are of more than theoretical interest. Understanding what it means to be healthy has implications for choices in medical treatment, for ethically sound informed consent, and for accurate assessment of policies or programs. This deeper understanding can help us create more effective public policy for health and medicine. It is notable that such contentious legal initiatives as the Americans with Disability Act and the Patients' Bill of Rights fail to define adequately the medical terms on which their effectiveness depends. In Ethics and the Metaphysics of Medicine, Kenneth Richman develops an "embedded instrumentalist" theory of health and applies it to practical problems in health care and medicine, addressing topics that range from the philosophy of science to knee surgery. "Embedded instrumentalist" theories hold that health is a match between one's goals and one's ability to reach those goals, and that the relevant goals may vary from individual to individual. This captures the normative implications of the term health while avoiding problematic relativism. Richman's embedded instrumentalism differs from other theories of health in drawing a distinction between the health of individuals as biological organisms and the health of individuals as moral agents. This distinction illuminates many difficulties in patient-provider communication and helps us understand conflicts between promoting health and promoting ethically permissible behavior. After exploring, expanding, and defending this theory in the first part of the book, Richman examines its ethical implications, discussing such concerns as the connection between medical beneficence and respect for autonomy, patient-provider communication, living wills, and clinical education.

The Philosophy of Medicine Reborn

The Philosophy of Medicine Reborn
Author: Edmund D. Pellegrino
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2008-03-01
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 026816147X
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Edmund D. Pellegrino has played a central role in shaping the fields of bioethics and the philosophy of medicine. His writings encompass original explorations of the healing relationship, the need to place humanism in the medical curriculum, the nature of the patient’s good, and the importance of a virtue-based normative ethics for health care. In this anthology, H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., and Fabrice Jotterand have created a rich presentation of Pellegrino’s thought and its development. Pellegrino’s work has been dedicated to showing that bioethics must be understood in the context of medical humanities, and that medical humanities, in turn, must be understood in the context of the philosophy of medicine. Arguing that bioethics should not be restricted to topics such as abortion, third-party-assisted reproduction, physician-assisted suicide, or cloning, Pellegrino has instead stressed that such issues are shaped by foundational views regarding the nature of the physician-patient relationship and the goals of medicine, which are the proper focus of the philosophy of medicine. This volume includes a preface (“Apologia”) by Dr. Pellegrino and a comprehensive Introduction by the editors. Of interest to medical ethicists as well as students, scholars, and physicians, The Philosophy of Medicine Reborn offers fascinating insights into the emergence of a field and the work of one of its pioneers.

The Way of Medicine

The Way of Medicine
Author: Farr Curlin
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2021-08-15
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0268200874
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Today’s medicine is spiritually deflated and morally adrift; this book explains why and offers an ethical framework to renew and guide practitioners in fulfilling their profession to heal. What is medicine and what is it for? What does it mean to be a good doctor? Answers to these questions are essential both to the practice of medicine and to understanding the moral norms that shape that practice. The Way of Medicine articulates and defends an account of medicine and medical ethics meant to challenge the reigning provider of services model, in which clinicians eschew any claim to know what is good for a patient and instead offer an array of “health care services” for the sake of the patient’s subjective well-being. Against this trend, Farr Curlin and Christopher Tollefsen call for practitioners to recover what they call the Way of Medicine, which offers physicians both a path out of the provider of services model and also the moral resources necessary to resist the various political, institutional, and cultural forces that constantly push practitioners and patients into thinking of their relationship in terms of economic exchange. Curlin and Tollefsen offer an accessible account of the ancient ethical tradition from which contemporary medicine and bioethics has departed. Their investigation, drawing on the scholarship of Leon Kass, Alasdair MacIntyre, and John Finnis, leads them to explore the nature of medicine as a practice, health as the end of medicine, the doctor-patient relationship, the rule of double effect in medical practice, and a number of clinical ethical issues from the beginning of life to its end. In the final chapter, the authors take up debates about conscience in medicine, arguing that rather than pretending to not know what is good for patients, physicians should contend conscientiously for the patient’s health and, in so doing, contend conscientiously for good medicine. The Way of Medicine is an intellectually serious yet accessible exploration of medical practice written for medical students, health care professionals, and students and scholars of bioethics and medical ethics.

An Introductory Philosophy of Medicine

An Introductory Philosophy of Medicine
Author: James A. Marcum
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2008-05-07
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1402067976
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In this book the author explores the shifting philosophical boundaries of modern medical knowledge and practice occasioned by the crisis of quality-of-care, especially in terms of the various humanistic adjustments to the biomedical model. To that end he examines the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical boundaries of these medical models. He begins with their metaphysics, analyzing the metaphysical positions and presuppositions and ontological commitments upon which medical knowledge and practice is founded. Next, he considers the epistemological issues that face these medical models, particularly those driven by methodological procedures undertaken by epistemic agents to constitute medical knowledge and practice. Finally, he examines the axiological boundaries and the ethical implications of each model, especially in terms of the physician-patient relationship. In a concluding Epilogue, he discusses how the philosophical analysis of the humanization of modern medicine helps to address the crisis-of-care, as well as the question of “What is medicine?” The book’s unique features include a comprehensive coverage of the various topics in the philosophy of medicine that have emerged over the past several decades and a philosophical context for embedding bioethical discussions. The book’s target audiences include both undergraduate and graduate students, as well as healthcare professionals and professional philosophers. “This book is the 99th issue of the Series Philosophy and Medicine...and it can be considered a crown of thirty years of intensive and dynamic discussion in the field. We are completely convinced that after its publication, it can be finally said that undoubtedly the philosophy of medicine exists as a special field of inquiry.”

Philosophical Medical Ethics

Philosophical Medical Ethics
Author: Raanan Gillon
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Total Pages: 204
Release: 1986
Genre: Medical
ISBN:
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Philosphical medical ethics forms the basis of the codes of conduct and legal constraints involved in doctors' professional lives. This series of articles presents a British approach to the concepts, assumptions, beliefs, attitudes, and arguments underlying medico-moral decision-making in the context of medical practice. The book serves as an introduction whose aim is to encourage more rigorous analysis of the moral dilemmas confronting all physicians and to contribute to a comprehensive and coherent moral theory for medical practice.

Rethinking Health Care Ethics

Rethinking Health Care Ethics
Author: Stephen Scher
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2018-08-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9811308306
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​The goal of this open access book is to develop an approach to clinical health care ethics that is more accessible to, and usable by, health professionals than the now-dominant approaches that focus, for example, on the application of ethical principles. The book elaborates the view that health professionals have the emotional and intellectual resources to discuss and address ethical issues in clinical health care without needing to rely on the expertise of bioethicists. The early chapters review the history of bioethics and explain how academics from outside health care came to dominate the field of health care ethics, both in professional schools and in clinical health care. The middle chapters elaborate a series of concepts, drawn from philosophy and the social sciences, that set the stage for developing a framework that builds upon the individual moral experience of health professionals, that explains the discontinuities between the demands of bioethics and the experience and perceptions of health professionals, and that enables the articulation of a full theory of clinical ethics with clinicians themselves as the foundation. Against that background, the first of three chapters on professional education presents a general framework for teaching clinical ethics; the second discusses how to integrate ethics into formal health care curricula; and the third addresses the opportunities for teaching available in clinical settings. The final chapter, "Empowering Clinicians", brings together the various dimensions of the argument and anticipates potential questions about the framework developed in earlier chapters.

The Virtues in Medical Practice

The Virtues in Medical Practice
Author: Edmund D. Pellegrino
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 1993-11-11
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0199748756
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In recent years, virtue theories have enjoyed a renaissance of interest among general and medical ethicists. This book offers a virtue-based ethic for medicine, the health professions, and health care. Beginning with a historical account of the concept of virtue, the authors construct a theory of the place of the virtues in medical practice. Their theory is grounded in the nature and ends of medicine as a special kind of human activity. The concepts of virtue, the virtues, and the virtuous physician are examined along with the place of the virtues of trust, compassion, prudence, justice, courage, temperance, and effacement of self-interest in medicine. The authors discuss the relationship between and among principles, rules, virtues, and the philosophy of medicine. They also address the difference virtue-based ethics makes in confronting such practical problems as care of the poor, research with human subjects, and the conduct of the healing relationship. This book with the author's previous volumes, A Philosophical Basis of Medical Practice and For the Patient's Good, are part of their continuing project of developing a coherent moral philosophy of medicine.

John Gregory's Writings on Medical Ethics and Philosophy of Medicine

John Gregory's Writings on Medical Ethics and Philosophy of Medicine
Author: Laurence B. McCullough
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2007-11-23
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0585323151
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This volume introduces a new subseries of Philosophy and Medicine, Classics of Medical Ethics. The purpose of this new subseries is to bring out scholars' editions of major works in the history of medical ethics and philosophy of medicine. This new subseries will target for publication texts that are long out of print and difficult to access. Each volume will contain an introduction to the writings on medical ethics and philosophy of medicine produced by the original author. Each volume will also contain a guide to the primary and major secondary Hterature, to facilitate teaching and scholarship in bioethics, philosophy of medicine, and history of medicine. Texts will be presented in their origi nal style and will provide pagination of the original, so that citations can be made either to the original text or to the page numbers in these vol umes. Finally, each volume will be well indexed, again to facilitate teaching and research. Bioethics and philosophy of medicine - the former more so than the latter - have an insufficiently developed understanding of themselves as having a history. As a consequence, these fields lack the maturity that critical dialogue of the past with the present provides for other fields and disciplines of the humanities. To the extent that this problem is due to the fact that major primary historical sources are not readily available, this subseries will contribute to the further development and maturation of bioethics and philosophy of medicine as fields of the humanities.