Naming What We Do

Most human beings, when ill, want to be treated in a way that is deeply respectful of their bodily needs and, more than that, of all aspects of who they are and where they come from. But in an era dominated by an essentially singular focus on the physical body, diagnosis, best practice algorithms, powerful technologies, time poverty and cost escalation, ‘whole person’ approaches to patients are both hardly imaginable and a tall order for many clinicians. But numerous clinical movements have grappled with providing treatments and care that address more than the physical body. These movements have different names and examining these provides an understanding of the deep and complex issues that emerge when we try to treat people in a manner befitting whole persons. It must be said that any process of naming is essentially reductive. We mean something (or many things) in the choice of name. If we name it in this way, then we are not naming it in that way. And the people who do the naming bring to the process certain assumptions, which may or may not be declared or even obvious. I will seek to illustrate this here by critiquing names that have been applied to types of clinical work that constitute attempts to address more than the biological body.