Open Access Open Access  Restricted Access Subscription Access

Healthcare personalism: a prolegomenon

James Marcum

Abstract


Healthcare personalism is an approach to providing quality healthcare that focuses on personhood with respect to each member of the healthcare team and not to anyone team member, whether patient or healthcare provider. To that end, the philosophy of personalism provides a conceptual framework for developing a dynamic notion of healthcare. Specifically, the person is uniquely original, relationally intersubjective, and communicatively solidaritous. Moreover, healthcare personalism is non-foundational in the sense that no one approach to providing healthcare suffices for the clinical encounter. Rather, the encounter must be open to a range of possibilities for providing healthcare. In contrast to evidence-based medicine, healthcare personalism does not hold to single foundation, i.e. evidence, for practicing healthcare. Evidence is important but not foundational. And, in contrast to patient-entered medicine, it does not privy the patient to the personhood of other healthcare team members. The personhood of everyone involved in healthcare is required for meeting the goal of quality healthcare—the relief of human suffering.

Keywords


Clinical encounter, epistemology, evidence-based medicine, foundationalism, healthcare quality, holism, impersonalism, non-foundationalism, ontology, patient-centered medicine, personalism, person-centered healthcare, reductionism

Full Text:

PDF

References


Schotsmans, P. (2005). Personalism in medical ethics. Ethical Perspectives 6 (1) 10-20.

Cassell, E.J. (2004). The nature of suffering and the goals of medicine, 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sackett, D.L., Rosenberg, W., Gray, J.A., Haynes, R.B. & Richardson, W.S. (1996). Evidence based medicine: what it is and what it isn’t. British Medical Journal 312 (7023) 71-72.

Satya-Murti, S. (1997). Evidence-based medicine: how to practice and teach EBM. Journal of the American Medical Association 278 (2) 168-170.

Charlton, B.G. & Miles, A. (1998). The rise and fall of EBM. Quarterly Journal of Medicine 91 (5) 371-374.

Miles, A. & Asbridge, J.E. (2014). Modern healthcare: a technical giant, yet an ethical child? European Journal of Person Centered Healthcare 2 (2) 135-139.

Straus, S.E. & McAlister, F.A. (2000). Evidence-based medicine: a commentary on common criticisms. Canadian Medical Association Journal 163 (7) 837-841.

Annis, D.B. (1977). Epistemic foundationalism. Philosophical Studies 31 (5) 345-352.

Porter, S.L. (2006). Restoring the foundations of epistemic justification: a direct realist and conceptualist theory of foundationalism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Sosa, E. (1980). The foundations of foundationalism. Nous, 547-564.

Jones, R.H. (2000). Reductionism: analysis and the fullness of reality. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses.

Marcum, J.A. (2009). The conceptual foundations of systems biology: an introduction. New York: Nova Science Publishers.

Van Regenmortel, M. & Hull, D. (eds.). (2002). Promises and limits of reductionism in the biomedical sciences. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Bodenheimer, T., Wagner, E.H. & Grumbach, K. (2002). Improving primary care for patients with chronic illness: the chronic care model, Part 2. Journal of the American Medical Association 288 (15) 1909-1914.

Bowne, B.P. (1908). Personalism. Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

Marcum, J.A. (2004). Biomechanical and phenomenological models of the body, the meaning of illness and quality of care. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 7, 311-320.

Cleary, P.D. & McNeil, B.J. (1988). Patient satisfaction as an indicator of quality care. Inquiry 25 (1) 25-36.

Shelton, P.J. (2000). Measuring and improving patient satisfaction. Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen Publishers.

Bengtsson, J.O. (2006). The worldview of personalism: origins and early development. New York: Oxford University Press.

Buford, T.O. & Oliver, H.H. (eds.). (2002). Personalism revisited: its proponents and critics. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V.

Sayre, P.A. (2010). Personalism. In: A companion to philosophy of religion, 2nd edition., pp. 151-158. (C. Taliaferro, P. Draper & P.L. Quinn, eds.). Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Kohák, E. (1997). Personalism: towards a philosophical delineation. Personalist Forum 13 (1) 3-11.

Bengtsson, J.O. (2013). Personalism. In: Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions, pp. 1626-1634. (A. Runehov & L. Oviedo, eds.). New York: Springer.

Henning, B.G. & Scarfe, A., (eds.). (2013). Beyond mechanism: putting life back into biology. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Audi, R. (1993). The structure of justification. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Crumley, J.S. II. (2009). An introduction to epistemology, 2nd edition. Buffalo, NY: Broadview Press.

Beauchamp, T.L. & Childress, J.F. (2001). Principles of biomedical ethics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Institute of Medicine. (2001). Crossing the quality chasm: a new health System for the 21st century. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Roter, D. (2000). The enduring and evolving nature of the patient–physician relationship. Patient Education and Counseling 39 (1) 5-15.

Tauber, A.I. (2005). Patient autonomy and the ethics of responsibility. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hughes, J.C., Bamford, C. & May, C. (2008). Types of centredness in healthcare. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 11, 455-463.

Macklin, R. (1983). Personhood in the bioethics literature. The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly. Health and Society 61 (1) 35-57.

Goodman, M.F. (1992). A sufficient condition for personhood. Personalist Forum 8 (1) 75-81.

DeRobertis, E. & Iuculano, J. (2005). Metaphysics and psychology: a problem of the personal. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 25 (2) 238.

Kohák, E. (1988). Personalism: the next hundred years. Personalist Forum 4 (2) 43-52.

Coulter, A. & Ellins, J. (2006). Patient-focused interventions: a review of the evidence. London: Health Foundation.

Dubertret, L. (2007). Patient-oriented medicine: a therapeutic revolution. Actas Dermo-Sifiliográficas 98 (5) 297-301.

Bardes, C.L. (2012). Defining “patient-centered medicine”. New England Journal of Medicine 366 (9) 782-783.

Upshur, R.E.G. (2002). If not evidence, then what? Or does medicine really need a base? Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 8 (2) 113-119.

Tauber, A.I. (2000). Confessions of a medicine man: an essay in popular philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5750/ejpch.v3i2.941

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.