Theoretical medicine and bioethics最新文献

Therapy-speak is the imprecise and superficial integration of psychotherapy language into everyday communication, especially by privileged or wealthy people. Despite the advantages of normalizing psychotherapy language, such as resisting epistemic injustice and enhancing awareness of mental health issues, therapy-speak raises important concerns. On the epistemic front, therapy-speak is susceptible to the erosion of the meaning and relevance of psychotherapy terms, pathologizing, and the risk of self-diagnosis. Regarding its ethical concerns, therapy-speak might be used to discredit individuals, evade responsibilities, and even signal social status, by taking an objective stance. Beyond these epistemic and ethical concerns, therapy-speak can also be weaponized to promote and perpetuate some forms of epistemic injustice, and to generate affective injustice. In particular, we argue that the weaponization of therapy-speak exploits the epistemic authority and the credibility excesses of medical evidence, the conflation between the descriptive and the normative, and the linguistic strategy of deniability to impose a specific way to manage emotions in challenging, and unjust, situations.

This paper critically evaluates Alex Broadbent's Inquiry Thesis, which defines medicine by the core competencies of prediction and understanding. While the thesis seeks to avoid parochialism by identifying features that could apply across traditions, its applicability falters when examined against African traditional medicine (ATM). Using ATM as a test case, this paper demonstrates that legitimate medical systems can operate coherently and enjoy broad social legitimacy without consistently exercising prediction or understanding in Broadbent's sense. This challenges the Inquiry Thesis both as a general account of medicine and as an inclusive framework. Accordingly, this paper tentatively advances a Refined Curative Thesis (RCT), which shifts the unifying criterion from competencies to aims: medicine is defined as the organized, socially recognized effort to restore or maintain health through interventions directed at beneficial change. RCT accommodates epistemic diversity, preserves conceptual discipline, and avoids collapsing into unstructured pluralism. By centring the curative aim, this revised account offers a more inclusive, philosophically robust, and culturally sensitive definition of medicine. The analysis deepens philosophical understanding of medicine while also bearing practical significance for global health policy, intercultural dialogue, and the recognition of diverse medical systems.

The word 'dignity' has been applied in the context of everything from hospital gowns to the image of God. Despite calls to jettison the concept from moral philosophy, the term persists, and definitional schema abound. This essay argues that 'dignity' is a placeholder for fundamental values, a 'buck-passing' move that signals the strength of feeling behind the argument. Like a 'burning' or 'stabbing' pain without fire or blades, claims of dignity violation help to diagnose the kind of moral harm that elicits the feeling of indignation. In this sense, 'dignity' is a move in a language game that challenges the epistemic constraints around who matters. To demonstrate how 'dignity' operates as a move in a language-game rooted in embodiment, I conclude with a consideration of how deceased bodies are treated in medical education and the Honor Walk. If understood as a call to evaluate who counts as 'people-like-us' and how they should be treated, dignity remains a valuable concept in bioethics despite its ambiguity.

This article examines the cases of Jahi McMath and Poe's M. Valdemar to reconceptualize the idea of undeath from a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective. It builds upon the ambiguity existing in defining a body in the state of 'brain death' after permanent loss of consciousness to analyze how the brain, as Deleuze and Guattari's 'partial object,' facilitates the construction of the mind as a transcendent entity. Evaluated by the presence/lack of consciousness, this transcendent entity becomes the factor defining the health of a body on life-support. In combining aspects of medical science with theoretical abstraction, this article aims to change the negative conception of an 'undead body' as an abjection that disrupts the boundary between the binaries of life and death. Instead, it will re-evaluate such bodies as 'undead assemblages' that exist in liminal spaces of constant flux and possess the potential to be affected by the environment that sustains them. We will further explore how the minor identities of such bodies affect their treatment within the medical community and set off the process of becoming-minor and becoming-patient, as Jahi and Valdemar's marginalized bodies transform into Deleuzian events that challenge the boundaries of life, death, and identity within medical and cultural systems.

A common conflation happens both in everyday discussions in medicine as well as in the medical literature-namely, equating 'parents of minors' with 'surrogate decision makers.' It is important for pediatric clinicians and ethicists to stop using language that confuses and obscures the important difference between surrogates and parents in ways that affect the ethics of decision-making for minors. Specifically, parents of minor children are morally different than surrogates, and by using surrogate language, a misunderstanding arises that distorts the moral space and relevant obligations that pediatric providers, parents of minors, and even pediatric patients find themselves in when making medical decisions.

Racial classifications have a complex and troubled past in the social and scientific history of humankind. They are the result of racism and have been used to devalue and degrade non-White people. Although the concept of race has acquired a social component and the genetic similarity of people based on race has been proven, the category is increasingly used in pharmacogenetic studies to create biased study populations under the guise of personalized medicine. The heart failure drug BiDil, which was only approved for Black people in 2005, gained particular notoriety. Its race-specific approval reignited the debate about the assumption that there are genetic differences between people of different races and led to a further biopolitical instrumentalization of the term 'race'. Despite the expiry of the race-specific patent, race-specific labeling continues to take place in research. In this paper, these racializations of pharmacogenetics are examined, explaining how they arise and how they are kept alive. Finally, this paper argues for better moderation of race in pharmacogenetic studies.