Download or read book Ethics and the Metaphysics of Medicine written by Kenneth A. Richman and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-06-18 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Meta Physician on Call for Better Health written by Steven E. Hodes M.D. and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2007-11-30 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steven E. Hodes, M.D., initially trained in traditional, high-caliber medical programs that led him through graduation at the Albert Einstein Medical School and to a fellowship at Mount Sinai Hospital. But many years later, he saw something vital missing in his approach to healthcare. I was trained as a physician, not a healer...taught to view the patient as a machine suffering from some mechanical failure. My purpose was to be the best diagnostician possible, he explains. Then events occurred that opened the eyes of this now veteran physician to deep insights about the mind-body-spirit connection. That awakening moved him to a metaphysical view of health—a view more spiritual than religious, but still firmly grounded in science. Embracing his role as a metaphysician, he also began to see himself as a meta-physician, or doctor transformed (meta) by this new awareness. In this book, Hodes describes his journey to becoming a metaphysician on call. He points out profound, yet simple, observations and beliefs that affect our perception of the nature of reality—metaphysics—which, in turn, can largely affect our well-being in all senses—body, mind, and spirit. We all can and should take responsibility for our own well-being on all levels, he explains. This book is designed to inspire us to ask our own questions, and gather our own evidence to enhance all areas of our lives and well-being, and so find healing and peace.
Download or read book Metaphysics and Medicine written by D O Larry Malerba and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-11-14 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western medicine is guided by an outdated paradigm that is badly in need of revision. This groundbreaking book argues that the failures of modern medicine are not, as we are conditioned to believe, unavoidable missteps along the road to scientific advancement. They are predictable consequences of wrong thinking, of false beliefs about disease and the healing process. Science evolves, and so should medicine. When we absorb the lessons learned from practical experience, it cannot help but change the way we think about health and healing. The solution that Dr. Malerba proposes is nothing less than a renaissance in philosophy of medicine. Intended for all readers, this is a clear and easy-to-read discussion of issues that influence the practical choices we make regarding our health in times of illness. Metaphysics & Medicine is about the philosophical and practical differences between science as it was originally conceived, science as it is construed by mainstream medicine today, the particularly disturbing modern trend called scientism, and a more authentic and inclusive form of future medical science that will no longer ignore human consciousness and the lessons learned from subjective experience. Modern medicine lacks a coherent philosophy to help make sense of the complex dynamics of illness, healing, and mind-body relationships. Most medical dysfunction can be traced to this absence of guiding principles, which, if remedied, would revolutionize the practice of medicine. Conventional medicine is based upon a distorted conception of reality that fails to incorporate human consciousness, which is the most critical determinant of health and well-being. Metaphysics & Medicine is a blueprint for a way forward that will rescue medicine from its materialistic bias and bring it into alignment with contemporary thought regarding mind-body principles and holistic theory and practice. It examines the flawed ideas behind conventional medical strategies and proposes a new philosophy of medicine that changes the way we think about science, illness, and healing.
Download or read book An Introductory Philosophy of Medicine written by James A. Marcum and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-05-07 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.”
Download or read book Organism Medicine and Metaphysics written by S.F. Spicker and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Festschrift is presented to Professor Hans Jonas on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, as affirmation of the contributors' respect and admiration. As a volume in the series 'Philosophy and Medicine' the contributions not only reflect certain interests and pursuits of the scholar to whom it is dedi cated, but also serve to bring to convergence the interests of the contributors in the history of humanity and medicine, the theory of organism, medicine in the service of the patient's autonomy, and the metaphysical, i.e., phenome nological foundations of medicine. Notwithstanding the nature of such personal gifts as the authors' contributions (which, with the exception of the late Hannah Arendt's, appear here for the first time), the essays also transcend the personal and serve to elaborate specific themes and theses disclosed in the numerous writings of Hans Jonas. The editor owes a personal debt of gratitude to many, including Hannah Arendt, who offered their assistance during the preparation of the volume.
Download or read book The Anticipatory Corpse written by Jeffrey P. Bishop and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2011-09-19 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this original and compelling book, Jeffrey P. Bishop, a philosopher, ethicist, and physician, argues that something has gone sadly amiss in the care of the dying by contemporary medicine and in our social and political views of death, as shaped by our scientific successes and ongoing debates about euthanasia and the “right to die”—or to live. The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying, informed by Foucault’s genealogy of medicine and power as well as by a thorough grasp of current medical practices and medical ethics, argues that a view of people as machines in motion—people as, in effect, temporarily animated corpses with interchangeable parts—has become epistemologically normative for medicine. The dead body is subtly anticipated in our practices of exercising control over the suffering person, whether through technological mastery in the intensive care unit or through the impersonal, quasi-scientific assessments of psychological and spiritual “medicine.” The result is a kind of nihilistic attitude toward the dying, and troubling contradictions and absurdities in our practices. Wide-ranging in its examples, from organ donation rules in the United States, to ICU medicine, to “spiritual surveys,” to presidential bioethics commissions attempting to define death, and to high-profile cases such as Terri Schiavo’s, The Anticipatory Corpse explores the historical, political, and philosophical underpinnings of our care of the dying and, finally, the possibilities of change. This book is a ground-breaking work in bioethics. It will provoke thought and argument for all those engaged in medicine, philosophy, theology, and health policy.
Download or read book Handbook of Analytic Philosophy of Medicine written by Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-04-06 with total page 1232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Establishing Medical Reality written by Harold Kincaid and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-06-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medicine raises numerous philosophical issues. This volume approaches the philosophy of medicine from the broad naturalist perspective. This holds that philosophy must be continuous with, constrained by, and relevant to empirical results of the natural and social sciences. The upshot is a unique volume that ties medicine to contemporary issues in philosophy of science and metaphysics.
Download or read book Traditional Chinese Medicine and Metaphysics written by Ming Wong and published by . This book was released on 2010-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Confessions of a Medicine Man written by Alfred I. Tauber and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book probes the ethical structure of contemporary medicine in an argument accessible to lay readers, healthcare professionals, and ethicists alike.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine written by Miriam Solomon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 782 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine is a comprehensive guide to topics in the fields of epistemology and metaphysics of medicine. It examines traditional topics such as the concept of disease, causality in medicine, the epistemology of the randomized controlled trial, the biopsychosocial model, explanation, clinical judgment and phenomenology of medicine and emerging topics, such as philosophy of epidemiology, measuring harms, the concept of disability, nursing perspectives, race and gender, the metaphysics of Chinese medicine, and narrative medicine. Each of the 48 chapters is written especially for this volume and with a student audience in mind. For pedagogy and clarity, each chapter contains an extended example illustrating the ideas discussed. This text is intended for use as a reference for students in courses in philosophy of medicine and philosophy of science, and pairs well with The Routledge Companion to Bioethics for use in medical humanities and social science courses.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Metaphysical Medicine written by Benjamin Walker and published by Routledge/Thoemms Press. This book was released on 1978-01-01 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Encyclopedic survey of the whole field of arcane medical theory and practice from antiquity to modern times." Covers such topics as multiple personality, etherosis, and scatotherapy. Entry gives lengthy discussion and references. Index.
Download or read book Philosophy of Medicine written by Alex Broadbent and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophy of Medicine asks two central questions about medicine: what is it, and what should we think of it? Philosophy of medicine itself has evolved in response to developments in the philosophy of science, especially with regard to epistemology, positioning it to make contributions that are medically useful. This book locates these developments within a larger framework, suggesting that much philosophical thinking about medicine contributes to answering one or both of these two guiding questions. Taking stock of philosophy of medicine's present place in the landscape and its potential to illuminate a wide range of areas, from public health to policy, Alex Broadbent introduces various key topics in the philosophy of medicine. The first part of the book argues for a novel view of the nature of medicine, arguing that medicine should be understood as an inquiry into the nature and causes of health and disease. Medicine excels at achieving understanding, but not at translating this understanding into cure, a frustration that has dogged the history of medicine and continues to the present day. The second part of the book explores how we ought to consider medicine. Contemporary responses, such as evidence-based medicine and medical nihilism, tend to respond by fixing high standards of evidence. Broadbent rejects these approaches in favor of Medical Cosmopolitanism, or a rejection of epistemic relativism and pluralism about medicine that encourages conversations between medical traditions. From this standpoint, Broadbent opens the way to embracing alternative medicine. An accessible and user-friendly guide, Philosophy of Medicine puts these different debates into perspective and identifies areas that demand further exploration.
Download or read book Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy written by Peter Distelzweig and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-11 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents an innovative look at early modern medicine and natural philosophy as historically interrelated developments. The individual chapters chart this interrelation in a variety of contexts, from the Humanists who drew on Hippocrates, Galen, and Aristotle to answer philosophical and medical questions, to medical debates on the limits and power of mechanism, and on to eighteenth-century controversies over medical materialism and 'atheism.' The work presented here broadens our understanding of both philosophy and medicine in this period by illustrating the ways these disciplines were in deep theoretical and methodological dialogue and by demonstrating the importance of this dialogue for understanding their history. Taken together, these papers argue that to overlook the medical context of natural philosophy and the philosophical context of medicine is to overlook fundamentally important aspects of these intellectual endeavors.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics written by Michael J. Loux and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2005-09-08 with total page 740 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some of the world's specialists provide in this handbook essays about what kinds of things there are, in what ways they exist, and how they relate to each other. They give the word on such topics as identity, modality, time, causation, persons and minds, freedom, and vagueness.
Download or read book Metaphysics A Very Short Introduction written by Stephen Mumford and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-08-30 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphysics is one of the traditional four main branches of philosophy, alongside ethics, logic and epistemology. It is also an area that continues to attract and hold a fascination for many people yet it is associated with being complex and abstract. For some it is associated with the mystical or religious. For others it is known through the metaphysical poets who talk of love and spirituality. This Very Short Introduction goes right to the heart of the matter, getting to the basic and most important questions of metaphysical thought in order to understand the theory: What are objects? Do colours and shapes have some form of existence? What is it for one thing to cause another rather than just being associated with it? What is possible? Does time pass? By using these questions to initiate thought about the basic issues around substance, properties, changes, causes, possibilities, time, personal identity, nothingness and emergentism, Stephen Mumford provides a clear and simple path through this analytical tradition at the core of philosophical thought. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book Care and Cure written by Jacob Stegenga and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The philosophy of medicine has become a vibrant and complex intellectual landscape, and Care and Cure is the first extended attempt to map it. In pursuing the interdependent aims of caring and curing, medicine relies on concepts, theories, inferences, and policies that are often complicated and controversial. Bringing much-needed clarity to the interplay of these diverse problems, Jacob Stegenga describes the core philosophical controversies underlying medicine in this unrivaled introduction to the field. The fourteen chapters in Care and Cure present and discuss conceptual, metaphysical, epistemological, and political questions that arise in medicine, buttressed with lively illustrative examples ranging from debates over the true nature of disease to the effectiveness of medical interventions and homeopathy. Poised to be the standard sourcebook for anyone seeking a comprehensive overview of the canonical concepts, current state, and cutting edge of this vital field, this concise introduction will be an indispensable resource for students and scholars of medicine and philosophy.
