Health and Healing


Book Description

Winner of the American Health Book of the Year Award and the Medical Self-Care Book Award, HEALTH AND HEALING is a handbook for people who want to understand the strengths and weaknesses of conventional and alternative medicine. This revised edition includes a new Preface by author Andrew Weil, M.D.




Just Health Care


Book Description

Norman Daniels examines the medical policies and heath care dilemmas.




The Way of Medicine


Book Description

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.




Medical Philosophy


Book Description

This innovative book clarifies the distinction between philosophy of medicine and medical philosophy, expanding the focus from the ‘knowing that’ of the first to the ‘knowing how’ of the latter. The idea of patient and provider self-discovery becomes the method and strategy at the basis of therapeutic treatment. It develops the concept of ‘Central Medicine’, aimed at overcoming the dichotomies of Western–Eastern medicine and Traditional–Integrative approaches. Evidence-based and patient-centered medicine are analyzed in the context of the debate on placebo and non-specific effects alongside clinical research on the patient-doctor relationship, and the interactive nature of human relationships in general, including factors such as environment, personal beliefs, and perspectives on life’s meaning and purpose. Tomasi’s research incorporates neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and medicine in a clear, readable, and detailed way, satisfying the needs of professionals, students, and anyone who enjoys the exploration of the complexity of human mind, brain, and heart.




Philosophy of Population Health


Book Description

Population health has recently grown from a series of loosely connected critiques of twentieth-century public health and medicine into a theoretical framework with a corresponding field of research—population health science. Its approach is to promote the public’s health through improving everyday human life: afford-able nutritious food, clean air, safe places where children can play, living wages, etc. It recognizes that addressing contemporary health challenges such as the prevalence of type 2 diabetes will take much more than good hospitals and public health departments. Blending philosophy of science/medicine, public health ethics and history, this book offers a framework that explains, analyses and largely endorses the features that define this relatively new field. Presenting a philosophical perspective, Valles helps to clarify what these features are and why they matter, including: searching for health’s "upstream" causes in social life, embracing a professional commitment to studying and ameliorating the staggering health inequities in and between populations; and reforming scientific practices to foster humility and respect among the many scientists and non- scientists who must work collaboratively to promote health. Featuring illustrative case studies from around the globe at the end of all main chapters, this radical monograph is written to be accessible to all scholars and advanced students who have an interest in health—from public health students to professional philosophers.




Medical Philosophy: Conceptual Issues In Medicine


Book Description

This is the first book that analyzes and systematizes all the general ideas of medicine, in particular the philosophical ones, which are usually tacit. Instead of focusing on one or two points — typically disease and clinical trial — this book examines all the salient aspects of biomedical research and practice: the nature of disease; the logic of diagnosis; the discovery and design of drugs; the design of lab and clinical trials; the crafting of therapies and design of protocols; the moral duties and rights of physicians and patients; the distinctive features of scientific medicine and of medical quackery; the unique combination of basic and translational research; the place of physicians and nurses in society; the task of medical sociology; and the need for universal medical coverage. Health care workers, medicine buffs, and philosophers will find this thought-provoking book highly useful in their line of work and research.




Meaning and Medicine


Book Description

A chief aim of this resource is to rekindle interest in seeing health care not solely as a set of practices so problematic as to require ethical analysis by philosophers and other scholars, but as a field whose scrutiny is richly rewarding for the traditional concerns of philosophy.




The Enigma of Health


Book Description

The book brings together thirteen essays presented to medical and psychiatric societies, mainly during the 1970's and 1980's. In these essays, Gadamer justifies the reasons for a philosophical interest in health and medicine, and a corresponding need for health practitioners to enter into a dialogue with philosophy.




The Hermeneutics of Medicine and the Phenomenology of Health


Book Description

Fredrik Svenaeus' book is a delight to read. Not only does he exhibit keen understanding of a wide range of topics and figures in both medicine and philosophy, but he manages to bring them together in an innovative manner that convincingly demonstrates how deeply these two significant fields can be and, in the end, must be mutually enlightening. Medicine, Svenaeus suggests, reveals deep but rarely explicit themes whose proper comprehension invites a careful phenomenological and hermeneutical explication. Certain philosophical approaches, on the other hand - specifically, Heidegger's phenomenology and Gadamer's hermeneutics - are shown to have a hitherto unrealized potential for making sense of those themes long buried within Western medicine. Richard M. Zaner, Ann Geddes Stahlman Professor of Medical Ethics, Vanderbilt University




The Philosophy of Public Health


Book Description

Public health is a particular area of medical practice that raises a series of philosophical issues that require urgent discussion. The philosophy of public health includes metaphysical questions such as, what do we mean by 'public' in public health? How ought we to conceptualise the idea of 'populations'? Are they merely aggregations of individuals? It also includes epistemological questions such as, what methods are most appropriate for thinking about public health? How do empirical and normative issues relate to each other? Controversial ethical, political and social issues, including those relating to vaccinations, the threat of pandemics and possible restrictions to individual liberties, public health research, screening and obesity policy should also be considered. This volume includes a diverse set of papers exploring a number of the most important theoretical and practical issues that arise across the whole field of the philosophy of public health.