1. MEDICINE Illness, disease and disability plague man in every culture. But the form they take is not the same everywhere. Neither is man's reaction. Coping strategies, and the experience and knowledge backing them, depend very much on cultural setting. So medicine, the fabric of strategy and know ledge, can only be understood in the context of culture. In western society today, severe judgements are passed on medicine. Its store of knowledge and experience, and its repertory of strategies, have grown immensely during the last few decades. But it hardly alleviates dominant ailments, especially chronic diseases, diseases of old age and disturbances of social and mental functioning. We know that these ailments have come to the fore as the incidence of more "primitive" diseases declined in industrial societies. Infant deaths, and malnutrition and infections striking at young age, have dwindled to marginal significance in Western Europe and life expectancy at birth is twice that of some 150 years ago. Thus our new troubles are connected with past successes.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
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This is an interesting book and an unusual one. ... which undermines or questions much orthodox thinking in medicine and sets an apt and challenging agenda for future healing. The qualification that it will be up to others to develop and supplement positive arguments for items on this agenda should certainly not dissuade those committed to healing from reading it.
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Journal of Medical Ethics, 16:4, 1990
Sprache
Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
Illustrationen
1 s/w Abbildung
VII, 236 p. 1 illus.
Dateigröße
ISBN-13
978-94-009-1397-4 (9789400913974)
DOI
10.1007/978-94-009-1397-4
Schweitzer Klassifikation
I. Introduction.- 1. Medicine.- 2. Philosophy.- 3. The book.- Acknowledgements.- II. Cultural Infusions in the Philosophy of Medicine.- 1. Introduction.- 2. An American ontology.- 3. The case of anthropological medicine.- 4. Getting the record straight.- 5. Conclusions.- III. Regular Versus Alternative Medicine.- 1. Introduction.- 2. How not to think about science and philosophy.- 3. What is special about science.- 4. Interlude: how to proceed?.- 5. The scientific status of homeopathy.- 6. Psychic or spiritual healing.- 7. Discussion.- IV. Concepts of Health and Disease.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Health and disease in a biological perspective.- 3. The philosophy of normativism.- 4. Towards a new research program.- 5. The interplay of science, common sense and philosophy.- 6. Afterthoughts.- V. Mind and Body in Science and Philosophy.- 1. Introduction.- 2. The philosophical agenda.- 3. The mental and the physical: five philosophical views.- 4. A science of the mental?.- 5. The primacy of human existence: phenomenology.- 6. Things which don't fit.- 7. Discussion.- VI. Mind and Body in Medicine.- 1. Introduction.- 2. The mental suppressed: biological psychiatry.- 3. Will psychology help?.- 4. The psychosomatic connection.- 5. The limits of integration.- 6. The philosophical turn.- 7. Conclusions.- VII. Theses.- References.
