Philosophy of medicine

The philosophy of medicine is a branch of philosophy that explores issues in theory, research, and practice within the field of health sciences,^[1] more specifically in topics of epistemology, metaphysics, and medical ethics, which overlaps with bioethics. Philosophy and medicine, have had a long history of overlapping ideas. It was not until the nineteenth century that the professionalization of the philosophy of medicine came to be.^[2] In the late twentieth century, debates among philosophers and physicians ensued of whether the philosophy of medicine should be considered a field of its own from either philosophy or medicine.^[3] A consensus has since been reached that it is in fact a distinct discipline with its set of separate problems and questions. In recent years there have been a variety of university courses,^[4][5] journals,^[6][7][8][9] books,^{[10][11][12][13]} textbooks^[14] and conferences dedicated to the philosophy of medicine.

Demarcating therapy

Leg prostheses may allow double-amputee Paralympic sprinters to run faster than their Olympic counterparts.^[15]

See also: Prosthesis § Prosthetic enhancement, Human genetic enhancement, and New eugenics

Self-described opponents of historical eugenics first and foremost,^[a] are known to insist on a particularly stringent treatment-enhancement distinction (sometimes also called divide or gap). This distinction, naturally, "draws a line between services or interventions meant to prevent or cure (or otherwise ameliorate) conditions that we view as diseases or disabilities and interventions that improve a condition that we view as a normal function or feature of members of our species".^[18] Two proponents of the enhancement modality, in turn, define the supposed schism as follows:

An intervention that is aimed at correcting a specific pathology or defect of a cognitive subsystem may be characterized as therapeutic. An enhancement is an intervention that improves a subsystem in some way other than repairing something that is broken or remedying a specific dysfunction.^[19]

And yet the adequacy of such a dichotomy is highly contested in modern scholarly bioethics. One simple counterargument is that it has already long been ignored throughout various contemporary fields of scientific study and practice such as "preventive medicine, palliative care, obstetrics, sports medicine, plastic surgery, contraceptive devices, fertility treatments, cosmetic dental procedures, and much else".^[20] This is one way of conducting ostensively what has been coined the "moral continuum argument" by some of its critics.^[21]

Others posit on more theoretical grounds that the notion of therapy is connected to presumptuous concepts such as "normality" or "health," which have been called "fishy",^[22] and that, vice versa, "disease" is impossible to ever conclusively define,^[23] i.e. a vague notion, and so much so that some consider it practically useless.^[24] And yet others focus on the boundary between these therapeutic categories and related ones from discourses of enhancement, taking it to be, at best, "fuzzy"^[25] or relative.^[26][b]

Granting these assertions' validity, one may, once more, call this first and foremost a moral collapse of the therapy–enhancement distinction. Without such a clear divide, restorative medicine and exploratory eugenics also invariably become harder to distinguish;^[c] and accordingly might one explain the matter's relevance to ongoing transhumanist discourse.

Epistemology

Epistemology is a branch in the philosophy of medicine that is concerned with knowledge.^[29] The common questions asked are "What is knowing or knowledge?", "How do we know what we know?", "What is it we know when we claim we know".^{[30][page needed]} Philosophers differentiate theories of knowledge into three groups: knowledge of acquaintance, competence knowledge, and propositional knowledge. The knowledge of acquaintance is to be familiar with an object or event. For example, a surgeon would need to know the human anatomy before operating on the body. Competence of knowledge is to use known knowledge to perform a task skillfully. The surgeon must know how to perform the surgical procedure before executing it. Propositional knowledge is explanatory; it pertains to certain truths or facts. If the surgeon is performing an operation on the heart they must know the physiological function of the heart before the surgery is performed.^[31]

Metaphysics

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality including the relationship between mind and matter, substance and attribute, and possibility and actuality.^[32] The common questions asked within this branch are "What causes health?" and "What causes disease?". There is a growing interest in the metaphysics of medicine, particularly the idea of causality.^[33] Philosophers of medicine might not only be interested in how medical knowledge is generated, but also in the nature of such phenomena. Causation is of interest because the purpose of much medical research is to establish causal relationships, e.g. what causes disease, or what causes people to get better.^[34] The scientific processes used to generate causal knowledge give clues to the metaphysics of causation. For example, the defining feature of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) is that they are thought to establish causal relationships, whereas observational studies do not.^[35] In this instance, causation can be considered as something which is counterfactually dependent, i.e. the way RCTs differ from observational studies is that they have a comparison group in which the intervention of interest is not given.

Ontology of medicine

There is a large body of work on the ontology of biomedicine, including ontological studies of all aspects of medicine. Ontologies of specific interest to the philosophy of medicine include, for instance: (1) the ontological revolution which made modern science, in general, possible, (2) Cartesian dualism which makes modern medicine, in particular, possible, (3) the monogenetic conception of disease which has informed clinical medicine for a century or so^{[36][page needed]} and also the chemical and biological pathways which underlie the phenomena of health and disease in all organisms, (4) the conceptualization of entities such as 'placebos' and 'placebo effects'.

The Ontology of General Medical Science

The Ontology of General Medical Science (OGMS) is an ontology of entities involved in a clinical encounter. It includes a set of logical definitions of very general terms that are used across medical disciplines, including disease, disorder, disease course, diagnosis, and patient. The scope of OGMS is restricted to humans, but many terms can be applied also to other organisms. OGMS provides a formal theory of disease that is elaborated further by specific disease ontologies which extend it, including the infectious disease ontology (IDO) and the mental disease ontology.^{[37][copyright violation?]}

Cartesian dualism

Main article: Mind–body dualism § Cartesian dualism

René Descartes made ontological space for modern medicine by separating body from mind — while mind is superior to body as it constitutes the uniqueness of the human soul (the province of theology), body is inferior to mind as it is mere matter. Medicine simply investigated(s) the body as machine. While Cartesian dualism dominates clinical approaches to medical research and treatment, the legitimacy of the split between mind and body has been consistently challenged from a variety of perspectives.^{[38][page needed][39][page needed]}

Nosology and the monogenic conception of disease

Modern medicine, unlike Galenic medicine (which dealt with humours), is mechanistic. For example, when a bit of solid matter such as a poison or a worm impacts upon another bit of matter (when it enters the human body), this sets off a chain of motions, giving rise to disease, just as when one billiard ball knocks into another billiard, the latter is set in motion. When the human body is exposed to the solid pathogen, it falls ill, giving rise to the notion of a disease entity. Later in the history of modern medicine, particularly by the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in nosology (which is the classification of disease), the most powerful is the etiogically-defined approach as can be found in the monogenic conception of disease which covers not only infectious agents (bacteria, viruses. fungi, parasites, prions) but also genetics and poisons. While clinical medicine is concerned with the ill health of the individual patient when s/he has succumbed to disease, epidemiology is concerned with the pattern of diseases in populations in order to study their causes as well as how to manage, control, ameliorate the problems identified under study.

Clinical medicine, as presented above, is part of a reductionist approach to disease, based ultimately on Cartesian dualism which says that the proper study of medicine is an investigation of the body when the latter is viewed as machine. A machine can exhaustively be broken down into its component parts and their respective functions; in the same way, the dominant approach to clinical research and treatment assumes the human body can be broken down or analysed in terms of its component parts and their respective functions, such as its internal and external organs, the tissues and bones of which they are composed, the cells which make up the tissues, the molecules which constitute the cell, down to the atoms (the DNA sequences) which make up the cell in the body.

Placebo

Placebos and placebo effects have generated years of conceptual confusion about what kinds of thing they are.^{[40][41][42][43][44]} Example definitions of a placebo may refer to their inertness or pharmacological inactivity in relation to the condition they are given for. Similarly, example definitions of placebo effects may refer to the subjectivity or the non-specificity of those effects.^{[45][page needed]} These types of definitions suggest the view that when given a placebo treatment, one may merely feel better while not in fact being better.

The distinctions at work in these types of definition: between active and inactive or inert, specific and non-specific, and subjective and objective, have been problematized.^[40][46][47] For instance, if placebos are inactive or inert, then how do they cause placebo effects? More generally, there is scientific evidence from research investigating placebo phenomena which demonstrates that, for certain conditions (such as pain), placebo effects can be both specific and objective in the conventional sense.^{[48][page needed]}

Other attempts to define placebos and placebo effects therefore shift focus away from these distinctions and onto therapeutic effects that are caused or modulated by the context in which a treatment is delivered and the meaning that different aspects of treatments have for patients.^[49][50]

The problems arising over the definition of placebos and their effects may be said to be the heritage of Cartesian dualism, under which mind and matter are understood as two different substances. Furthermore, Cartesian dualism endorses a form of materialism which permits matter to have an effect on matter, or even matter to work on mind (epiphenomenalism, which is the raison d'être of psychopharmacology), but does not permit mind to have any effect on matter. This then means that medical science has difficulty in entertaining even the possibility that placebo effects are real, exist and may be objectively determinable and finding such reports difficult if not impossible to comprehend and/or accept. Yet such reports which appear to be genuine pose a threat to Cartesian dualism which provides the ontological underpinning for biomedicine especially in its clinical domain.^[36]

How physicians practice medicine

Evidence-based medicine

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is underpinned by the study of the ways in which knowledge can be gained regarding key clinical questions, such as the effects of medical interventions, the accuracy of diagnostic tests, and the predictive value of prognostic markers. EBM provides an account of how medical knowledge can be applied to clinical care. EBM not only provides clinicians with a strategy for best practice, but also, underlying that, a philosophy of evidence.

Interest in the EBM philosophy of evidence has led philosophers to consider the nature of EBM's hierarchy of evidence, which rank different kinds of research methodology, ostensibly, by the relative evidential weight they provide. While Jeremy Howick provides a critical defense of EBM,^[11] most philosophers have raised questions about its legitimacy. Key questions asked about hierarchies of evidence concern the legitimacy of ranking methodologies in terms of the strength of support that they supply;^[51][52] how instances of particular methods may move up and down a hierarchy;^[53] as well as how different types of evidence, from different levels in the hierarchies, should be combined. Critics of medical research have raised numerous questions regarding the unreliability of medical research.^{[54][page needed]}

Additionally the epistemological virtues of particular aspects of clinical trial methodology have been examined, mostly notably the special place that is given to randomisation,^[55][56][57] the notion of a blind experiment and the use of a placebo control.

Notable philosophers of medicine

• Georges Canguilhem
• Nancy Cartwright
• Hugo Tristram Engelhardt Jr.
• Fred Gifford
• Havi Carel
• Donald A. Gillies
• Jeremy Howick
• Hilde Lindemann
• David Magnus
• Randolph M. Nesse
• Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh
• Kenneth F. Schaffner
• Miriam Solomon
• David Papineau
• Edmund Pellegrino
• John Worrall

Notes

1. Examples include George W. Bush affiliated chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, the perennial bioconservative Leon Kass^[16] and communitarian philosopher Michael Sandel.^[17]
2. Invoking Bostrom and Roache once more,^[20] Hofmann explicates here:

   Some forms of assistive reproduction previously seen as enhancement are now considered to be treatments. This vagueness in therapy is mirrored in the classification of interventions. Vaccination can be seen as a form of prevention, but also as an enhancement of the immune system. To distinguish between laser eye surgery and contact lenses or glasses appears artificial.^[27]

3. More impactful yet:

   Because a flexible definition of health relates to a flexible definition of the disabled, any attempt to prohibit access to enhancement technology can be challenged as a violation of disability rights. Presented this way, disability rights are the gateway for the application of transhumanism. Any attempt to identify a moral or natural hazard associated with enhancement technology must also include some limitation of disability rights, which seems to go against the entire direction of human rights legislation over the last century.^[28]

References

1. Wulff, Henrik R.; Pedersen, Stig Andur; Rosenberg, Raben (1986). Philosophy of Medicine: an Introduction – via PhilPapers.
2. Ankeny, Rachel A.; Reiss, Julian (2016-06-06). "Philosophy of Medicine". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2016 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
3. Caplan, Arthur L. (March 1992). "Does the philosophy of medicine exist?". Theoretical Medicine. 13 (1): 67–77. doi:10.1007/BF00489220. ISSN 0167-9902. PMID 1604434. S2CID 22710233.
4. "History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine". Durham University. Archived from the original on 2012-01-20. Retrieved 2024-07-21.
5. "History and Philosophy of Evidence-Based Health Care". University of Oxford. Archived from the original on 2012-09-05. Retrieved 2024-07-21.
6. "Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy". SpringerLink. Retrieved 2024-07-21.
7. "Oxford Journals | Humanities&Medicine | Journal of Medicine and Philosophy". Oxford Journals. Archived from the original on 2008-05-09. Retrieved 2024-07-21.
8. "Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics". SpringerLink. Retrieved 2024-07-21.
9. Bhattacharjee, Pijush Kanti (2014). "Working Philosophy of All Medicines" (PDF). International Journal of Advanced Engineering and Global Technology. 2 (7): 823–7. ISSN 2309-4893. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-04-03.
10. Gabbay, Dov M. (2011-02-23). Philosophy of Medicine. Science Direct. ISBN 978-0-444-51787-6.
11. Howick, Jeremy (2011-02-23). The Philosophy of Evidence-based Medicine. John Wiley & Sons. doi:10.1002/9781444342673. ISBN 978-1-4443-4266-6. OCLC 716208689.
12. Pellegrino, Edmund D. (2008). The Philosophy of Medicine Reborn. University of Notre Dame Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctvpj7fgp. ISBN 978-0-268-08974-0. JSTOR j.ctvpj7fgp. OCLC 1120125536.
13. Lee, Keekok (2013-02-23). "The Philosophical Foundations of Modern Medicine". Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics. 34 (5): 437–440. doi:10.1007/s11017-013-9253-5. S2CID 141742194.
14. Stegenga, Jacob (2018). Care and Cure: An Introduction To Philosophy of Medicine. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-59503-0. OCLC 1028894449.
15. "A Paralympian faster than Bolt? Maybe soon, researchers say". Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Associated Press. 2012-08-28. Retrieved 2024-07-21.
16. Kass, Leon (2003). Beyond therapy: biotechnology and the pursuit of happiness (PDF). Harper Perennial. ISBN 978-0-06-073490-9. OCLC 1091186133.
17. Sandel, Michael (2009). The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering. Harvard University Press. p. 47. ISBN 978-0-674-04306-0. OCLC 1041148369.
18. Daniels, Norman (July 2000). "Normal Functioning and the Treatment-Enhancement Distinction". Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. 9 (3): 309–322. doi:10.1017/S0963180100903037. ISSN 0963-1801. PMID 10858880.
19. Bostrom, Nick; Sandberg, Anders (2009). "Cognitive Enhancement: Methods, Ethics, Regulatory Challenges" (PDF). Science and Engineering Ethics. 15 (3): 312. doi:10.1007/s11948-009-9142-5. ISSN 1353-3452. PMID 19543814 – via nickbostrom.com.
20. Bostrom, Nick; Roache, Rebecca (2008). "Ethical Issues in Human Enhancement". In Ryberg, Jesper; Petersen, Thomas; Wolf, Clark (eds.). New Waves in Applied Ethics (PDF). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 120–152. ISBN 978-0-230-53783-5. OCLC 1408785912 – via nickbostrom.com.
21. Malmqvist, Erik (2014-02-01). "Reproductive Choice, Enhancement, and the Moral Continuum Argument". Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. 39 (1): 43. doi:10.1093/jmp/jht058. ISSN 0360-5310. PMID 24334271.
22. Giubilini, Alberto (July 2015). "Normality, Therapy, and Enhancement: What Should Bioconservatives Say about the Medicalization of Love?". Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. 24 (3): 347–354. doi:10.1017/S0963180114000656. ISSN 0963-1801. PMID 26059959.
23. Worrall, John; Worrall, Jennifer (2001). "Defining disease: much ado about nothing?". In Tymieniecka, A-T; Agazzi, E. (eds.). Life interpretation and the sense of illness within the human condition. Analecta Husserliana. Vol. 72. Springer. pp. 33–55. doi:10.1007/978-94-010-0780-1_3. ISBN 978-94-010-0780-1.
24. Hesslow, Germund (March 1993). "Do we need a concept of disease?". Theoretical Medicine. 14 (1): 1–14. doi:10.1007/BF00993984. ISSN 0167-9902. PMID 8506536.
25. Sadegh-Zadeh, Kazem (2000-10-01). "Fuzzy Health, Illness, and Disease". The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. 25 (5): 605–638. doi:10.1076/0360-5310(200010)25:5;1-W;FT605. ISSN 0360-5310. PMID 11035544.
26. Bess, Michael (2010-12-01). "Enhanced Humans versus 'Normal People': Elusive Definitions". Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. 35 (6): 641–655. doi:10.1093/jmp/jhq053. ISSN 0360-5310. PMID 21076075.
27. Hofmann B (October 2017). "Limits to human enhancement: nature, disease, therapy or betterment?". BMC Med Ethics. 18 (1): 56. doi:10.1186/s12910-017-0215-8. PMC 5635529. PMID 29017486.
28. Tabachnick, David (2017). "The Blurred Line Between Therapy and Enhancement: A Consideration of Disability Rights and Transhumanism" 2017 Proceedings of the CPSA, abstract
29. Martinich, A.P.; Stroll, Avrum. "epistemology". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2019-05-01.
30. Bishop, Michael A.; Trout, J. D. (2005). Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-516229-5 – via Google Books.
31. Khushf, George (2013-10-01). "A Framework for Understanding Medical Epistemologies". The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine. 38 (5): 461–486. doi:10.1093/jmp/jht044. ISSN 0360-5310. PMID 24038643.
32. "metaphysics". American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.). 2011. Retrieved 2019-05-01 – via The Free Dictionary.
33. Worrall, John (2011). "Causality in medicine: Getting back to the Hill top". Preventive Medicine. 53 (4–5): 235–8. doi:10.1016/j.ypmed.2011.08.009. PMID 21888926.
34. Cartwright, Nancy (2009). "What are randomised controlled trials good for?" (PDF). Philosophical Studies. 147 (1): 59–70. doi:10.1007/s11098-009-9450-2. S2CID 56203659 – via eScholarship.
35. Bradford Hill, Austin (1965). "The Environment and Disease: Association or Causation?". Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine. 58 (5): 295–300. doi:10.1177/003591576505800503. PMC 1898525. PMID 14283879.
36. Lee, Keekok (2012). The Philosophical Foundations of Modern Medicine. London/New York: Palgrave/Macmillan.
37. "OGMS: Ontology for General Medical Science". J. Craig Venter Institute. Retrieved 2024-07-21.
38. Ewen, Elizabeth; Ewen, Stuart (2009). Typecasting: On the arts and sciences of human inequality. Seven Stories Press.
39. Eagleton, Terry (2016). Materialism. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-21880-0. OCLC 967270750.
40. Grünbaum, Adolf (1981). "The Placebo Concept". Behaviour Research and Therapy. 19 (2): 157–167. doi:10.1016/0005-7967(81)90040-1. PMID 7271692.
41. Gøtzsche, Peter C. (1994-10-01). "Is there logic in the placebo?". The Lancet. 344 (8927): 925–6. doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(94)92273-x. PMID 7934350. S2CID 33650340.
42. Nunn, Robin (2009-04-20). "It's time to put the placebo out of our misery". British Medical Journal. 338: b1568. doi:10.1136/bmj.b1568. S2CID 72382442.
43. Turner, Andrew (2012). "'Placebos' and the logic of placebo comparison". Biology & Philosophy. 27 (3): 419–432. doi:10.1007/s10539-011-9289-8. hdl:1983/6426ce5a-ab57-419c-bc3c-e57d20608807. S2CID 4488616.
44. Holman, Bennett (December 2015). "Why Most Sugar Pills are Not Placebos". Philosophy of Science. 82 (5): 1330–43. doi:10.1086/683817. S2CID 123784995.
45. Shapiro, Arthur K.; Shapiro, Elaine (1997). The Powerful Placebo. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 1-4214-0134-7. OCLC 605056625 – via Archive.org.
46. Miller, Franklin G.; Brody, Howard (2011). "Understanding and Harnessing Placebo Effects: Clearing Away the Underbrush". Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. 36 (1): 69–78. doi:10.1093/jmp/jhq061. PMC 3916752. PMID 21220523.
47. Howick, Jeremy (September 2009). "Questioning the methodologic superiority of 'placebo' over 'active' controlled trials". American Journal of Bioethics. 9 (9): 34–48. doi:10.1080/15265160903090041. PMID 19998192. S2CID 41559691.
48. Benedetti, Fabrizio (2009). Placebo Effects: Understanding the mechanisms in health and disease. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-101516-8. OCLC 1030228476.
49. Moerman, Daniel E. (2002). Meaning, Medicine, and the 'Placebo Effect'. Cambridge University Press – via Archive.org.
50. Thompson, Jennifer Jo; Ritenbaugh, Cheryl; Nichter, Mark (2009). "Reconsidering the Placebo Response from a Broad Anthropological Perspective". Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry. 33 (1): 112–152. doi:10.1007/s11013-008-9122-2. PMC 2730465. PMID 19107582.
51. La Caze, Adam (2008). "Evidence-Based Medicine Can't Be…". Social Epistemology. 22 (4): 353–379. doi:10.1080/02691720802559438. S2CID 219693849.
52. La Caze, Adam (2009). "Evidence-Based Medicine Must Be …". Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. 34 (5): 509–527. doi:10.1093/jmp/jhp034. PMID 19690324.
53. Guyatt, Gordon H.; et al. (2008-04-26). "GRADE: an emerging consensus on rating quality of evidence and strength of recommendations". British Medical Journal. 336 (7650): 924–6. doi:10.1136/bmj.39489.470347.AD. PMC 2335261. PMID 18436948.
54. Stegenga, Jacob (2018). Medical Nihilism. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198747048.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-874704-8. OCLC 1028894449.
55. Papineau, David (1994). "The Virtues of Randomization". British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 45 (2): 437–450. doi:10.1093/bjps/45.2.437.
56. Worrall, John (2002). "What Evidence in Evidence-Based Medicine?". Philosophy of Science. 69 (3): S316–S330. doi:10.1086/341855. JSTOR 3081103. S2CID 55078796.
57. Worrall, John (2007). "Why there's no cause to randomize". British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 58 (3): 451–488. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.120.7314. doi:10.1093/bjps/axm024.

External links

• Philosophy of Medicine article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy