ATTENDING TO THE PATIENT : Bioethics and Medical Literature
Robyn Bluhm’s recent paper draws our attention to the critical reality that "neither bioethics nor the philosophy of medicine has paid much attention to the relationship between vulnerability and health or illness."1 Robyn Blum states that "attending to vulnerability due to diminished...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Dharmaram College
2013
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| In: |
Journal of Dharma
Year: 2013, Volume: 38, Issue: 1, Pages: 57-70 |
| Further subjects: | B
Bioethics
B Vulnerability B blindspot |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | Robyn Bluhm’s recent paper draws our attention to the critical reality that "neither bioethics nor the philosophy of medicine has paid much attention to the relationship between vulnerability and health or illness."1 Robyn Blum states that "attending to vulnerability due to diminished health solves some problems in current accounts of health and disease and also allows us to better understand the ways in which health problems can change people’s lives."2 Her paper, together with the works3 of scholars such as Rogers, Mackenzie and Dodd indexes the fact that, within the context of illness and healing, the nature of vulnerability is relatively under researched. These scholars add that by focussing on patients’ vulnerability we are capable of illuminating the vital relationship between health and illness. For it is this very vulnerability, that is capable of granting us potentially profound insight into the social face of the illness and access to ‘seeing’ the person within the patient. I suggest that a medical ‘blind spot’ or ‘ignoring’ of patient vulnerability is not only embedded in (much of) the interaction between a large segment of health care workers and the patient, but is also insidiously present in much of the way that the medical literature is constructed. This proves to be ‘circular’ as the literature in turn is used as ‘instructional’ by the health care workers and medical practitioners,4 who further structure their patient relationships along the lines of what the medical literature says. |
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| ISSN: | 0253-7222 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of Dharma
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