Med Health Care Philos [JOURNAL]
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200 papers
Rethinking crossover and recovery in eating disorders through a dynamic and value-sensitive framework.
Serpico D, Petrolini V, Camporesi S
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Jun · PMID 41706314 · Full text
Eating Disorders (EDs) raise significant challenges from a diagnostic and nosological perspective. Much of this is due to the extensive overlap among diagnostic criteria, with symptoms being shared by several conditions...
Eating Disorders (EDs) raise significant challenges from a diagnostic and nosological perspective. Much of this is due to the extensive overlap among diagnostic criteria, with symptoms being shared by several conditions and subtypes. This nosological uncertainty is further exacerbated by two additional features of EDs, which will be the focus of this paper, namely diagnostic crossover and recovery. First, patients who acquire or lose one or more symptoms over time (symptom shifting) often transition to a new diagnostic category (crossover). Second, researchers working on EDs have recently underscored a problematic lack of inclusion of patients’ perspective on diagnostic and recovery processes, which results in an incomplete understanding of key aspects of EDs. Drawing on theoretical frameworks and concepts from Dynamical Systems Theory and epigenetics, we present a dynamic characterization of EDs that allows us to tackle the challenges of crossover and recovery. In our framework, different conditions represent robust endpoints in individuals’ developmental trajectories that are nonetheless flexible in certain circumstances. Thinking about EDs in diachronic terms also prompts us to significantly reframe our notion of recovery, not so much as the return to health but as the generation of future healthy trajectories, to be pursued in compliance with patients’ self-perception and aims. Indeed, the key role of patients’ values in determining their future trajectories testifies how psychiatric categories are not merely descriptive but constitutive, influencing both self-understanding and clinical practice.
Proxy consent to clinical research participation: how should it be justified?
Sim J, Wrigley A
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Jun · PMID 41688608 · Full text
In situations where first-hand, contemporaneous consent cannot be obtained from potential research participants-such as from those who lack competence-consent may be sought from a proxy, such as a family member. Such pro...
In situations where first-hand, contemporaneous consent cannot be obtained from potential research participants-such as from those who lack competence-consent may be sought from a proxy, such as a family member. Such proxy consent must be shown to have a sound moral justification if it is to be an acceptable alternative to first-hand consent. Two standards traditionally proposed for this purpose are those of substituted judgment and best interests. We describe and discuss the limitations of these two approaches, with particular reference to ways in which the context of research differs from that of clinical practice, where proxy consent has been more widely utilized. Other approaches that expand upon or depart from these traditional justifications are then discussed, namely the authentic life, endorsed life, and substituted interests models, as well as one that grounds proxy consent in a putative obligation to participate in research. Whilst these models obviate some of the limitations of the substituted judgment and best interests approaches, they have shortcomings of their own, and do not take full account of all of the relevant values and motivations that obtain in the context of clinical research. We propose an alternative and, in our view, more fruitful approach to justifying proxy consent to research participation-based on W D Ross's moral intuitionism-that does not rest upon a single moral principle but can accommodate a range of both deontological and consequentialist prima facie values.
Women's pain and psychogenic diagnoses.
Rosenqvist TC, Purinton S
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Jun · PMID 41661500 · Publisher ↗
Healthcare providers often rely on the following sort of concerning reasoning when encountering patients with difficult-to-explain symptoms: in the absence of evidence for a physical cause, the symptoms are presumed to b...
Healthcare providers often rely on the following sort of concerning reasoning when encountering patients with difficult-to-explain symptoms: in the absence of evidence for a physical cause, the symptoms are presumed to be psychological in origin. In this paper, we take up this concern in the context of chronic pain, with particular attention to how such reasoning disproportionately affects women and how it interacts with the many levels of gender bias in medicine. We first examine the unwarranted inference from diagnostic uncertainty to psychogenic diagnosis and explore how identity prejudice and diagnostic uncertainty interact in clinical practice. We then consider additional contributors to diagnostic uncertainty concerning women's pain: gendered research gaps and male-centered diagnostic paradigms. After outlining the harms associated with psychogenic diagnoses, we consider the objection that such diagnoses might be pragmatically justified. We end by calling for a more nuanced approach to diagnosing and treating chronic pain..
Ethical aspects of the use of social robots in caring for older people - a systematic qualitative review.
Leineweber M, Keusgen CV, Bubeck M … +3 more , Ranisch R, Haltaufderheide J, Klingler C
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Mar · PMID 41642560 · Full text
The use of social robotics in care for older persons is increasingly discussed as one way of meeting emerging care needs due to scarce resources. While many potential benefits are associated with robotic care technologie...
The use of social robotics in care for older persons is increasingly discussed as one way of meeting emerging care needs due to scarce resources. While many potential benefits are associated with robotic care technologies, there is a variety of ethical challenges. To support steps towards a responsible implementation and use, this review develops an overview on ethical aspects of the use of social robots in care for older people from a decision-makers' perspective. Electronic databases were queried using a comprehensive search strategy based on the key concepts of "ethical aspects", "social robotics" and "elderly care". Abstract and title screening was conducted by two authors independently. Full-text screening was conducted by one author following a joint consolidation phase. Data was extracted using MAXQDA24 by one author, based on a consolidated coding framework. Analysis was performed through modified qualitative content analysis. A total of 1,518 publications were screened, and 248 publications were included. We have organized our analysis in a scheme of ethical hazards, ethical opportunities and unsettled questions, identifying at least 60 broad ethical aspects affecting three different stakeholder groups. While some ethical issues are well-known and broadly discussed our analysis shows a plethora of potentially relevant aspects, often only marginally recognized, that are worthy of consideration from a practical perspective. The findings highlight the need for a contextual and detailed evaluation of implementation scenarios. To make use of the vast knowledge of the ethical discourse, we hypothesize that decision-makers need to understand the specific nature of this discourse to be able to engage in careful ethical deliberation.
Global inequities in pandemic vaccine allocation: what could academia do?
Gordijn B, Ten Have H
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Mar · PMID 41591718 · Publisher ↗
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Palliative sedation as a cultural solution in Israel: a philosophical-ethical inquiry into end-of-life practice in a multicultural society.
Waitzman R
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Jun · PMID 41553608 · Publisher ↗
Palliative sedation (PS) is a morally complex end-of-life practice that sits at the intersection of medicine, law, religion, and culture. While often framed as a purely clinical intervention aimed at alleviating intracta...
Palliative sedation (PS) is a morally complex end-of-life practice that sits at the intersection of medicine, law, religion, and culture. While often framed as a purely clinical intervention aimed at alleviating intractable suffering, this article argues that PS functions—particularly in pluralistic societies such as Israel—as a form of ethical mediation and cultural accommodation. Through a philosophical-theoretical inquiry, this paper explores PS not as a universally justified act, but as a “cultural solution”: a pragmatic ethical practice that enables care to proceed amid deep moral disagreement. Drawing on ethical theories—including utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, and care ethics—as well as on the concept of relational autonomy, the article demonstrates the limitations of universalist frameworks in contexts where bioethical norms are fragmented. In Israel, where Orthodox Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and secular liberal worldviews coexist, PS is often deployed without explicit naming or ethical consensus. It emerges in the legal and clinical “grey zones” created by the Patient’s Rights Law (1996) and the Dying Patient Act (2005), and is shaped by religious taboos, institutional ambiguity, and family-centered negotiation. Rather than treating this ambiguity as a flaw, the article reframes it as a moral achievement—a space in which physicians act as ethical mediators, and sedation operates as a bridge across conflicting values. By presenting PS as a culturally constructed and philosophically meaningful practice, the article calls for a non-universalist, context-sensitive ethics of end-of-life care, and contributes to the development of an intercultural philosophy of medicine grounded in moral pluralism, practical wisdom, and compassionate realism. The analysis is contextualized within Israel’s updated legal and medical directives on palliative sedation, including the 2015 Ministry of Health circular.
Are Health Nudges (Dis)Empowering?
Tengland PA
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Jun · PMID 41528669 · Full text
Health nudges have become popular in public health and health promotion, not least in countries that have liberal or libertarian policies. One reason is that nudges aim to change people's health-related behavior in a pos...
Health nudges have become popular in public health and health promotion, not least in countries that have liberal or libertarian policies. One reason is that nudges aim to change people's health-related behavior in a positive direction without infringing upon their freedom. There are other strategies to try to achieve health. Comparing behavior change and empowerment models, previous research found that empowerment is morally recommendable, both as a strategy and as a goal. Empowered people are good at taking care of their health. Using empowerment as an evaluative model, this paper investigates to what extent nudging as a health-promotion strategy leads to empowerment. Nudging can be empowering insofar as it leads to better health, although its effects on people's empowerment might be rather small, depending on whether the nudge creates a healthy habit or not. However, nudges do not, in general, have positive effects on other empowering factors, such as a person's knowledge, skills, self-confidence, self-esteem, or autonomy, since nudges typically bypass deliberate reflection. Moreover, nudging belongs to a group of manipulative strategies that appear to be detrimental to people's ability for autonomy. Thus, nudges risk being disempowering.
How choice became a goal in itself: analysing the emphasis on choice and control at the end of life through the work of Charles Taylor.
van Wijngaarden E
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Jun · PMID 41518565 · Full text
Choice has become a defining lens through which modern people imagine dying. A 'good death' is increasingly associated with the ability to articulate and realise personal preferences regarding the dying process: how, whe...
Choice has become a defining lens through which modern people imagine dying. A 'good death' is increasingly associated with the ability to articulate and realise personal preferences regarding the dying process: how, where, with whom, and even when one dies. In this paper, I examine the cultural shift that has elevated choice to a central moral ideal at the end of life. My research questions are: Why does choice matter so profoundly in contemporary societies? And how does this aspiration shape the way people live towards the end of life, and ultimately die? To answer these questions, I first offer a historical-cultural account of how choice has gradually come to function as a goal in itself. Drawing primarily on Charles Taylor's analyses, I bring his work into dialogue with that of other scholars including Giddens, Rosa, Dodds, and Mol. I then identify three existential implications of this shift that complicate contemporary engagement with death and dying: (1) an increasingly mastery-oriented stance towards life and death, (2) the arbitrariness of meaning, and (3) an understanding of respect as unquestioning compliance with individual preferences. Finally, I propose several ways to respond to these challenges by moving beyond a narrow focus on choice and control. I argue for a rethinking of the current dominant end-of-life discourse through a more dialogical and ambivalent understanding of our relation to life and death; one that is more attuned to the lived experience and unsettling realities of dying, and better suited to enriching contemporary debates and practices surrounding the end of life.
Building science and subjectivity from flesh. Towards a reconceptualization of neurophenomenology as a contribution to interdisciplinary health research.
Wiltsche HA, Zeiler K
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Jun · PMID 41493513 · Full text
Radical neurophenomenology offers new ways to re-thinking subjectivity and objectivity, and the relation between them. More specifically, radical neurophenomenology crucially relies on the notion of constitution to circu...
Radical neurophenomenology offers new ways to re-thinking subjectivity and objectivity, and the relation between them. More specifically, radical neurophenomenology crucially relies on the notion of constitution to circumvent the pitfalls that were associated with older, dualistic frameworks. Building on existing work, our paper has two primary goals. First, we will argue that Merleau-Ponty's later work provides a suitable framework for elaborating a viable concept of (co-)constitution. As we will discuss, it is especially Merleau-Ponty's notion of the flesh which allows for a better way to understand the concept of constitution. However, our paper extends beyond purely theoretical analysis and interpretation. Our second goal is to illustrate the pragmatic gain of our clarificatory efforts by discussing how a viable concept of constitution should affect and inform the understanding of modern neuroimaging techniques and a qualitative phenomenological philosophy analysis of subjectivity and lived experience, and how this contributes to neurophenomenological inquiries.
The ethical permissibility of financial incentives.
Al P, Brehaut J, Gillies K … +3 more , Presseau J, Yee ML, Weijer C
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Jun · PMID 41483034 · Full text
Randomized controlled trials are central to progress in medicine, but trialists commonly struggle to recruit the required number of participants. Offering financial incentives is one proposed solution, but financial ince...
Randomized controlled trials are central to progress in medicine, but trialists commonly struggle to recruit the required number of participants. Offering financial incentives is one proposed solution, but financial incentives may be problematic when they become irresistible and, thus, undermine the autonomy of potential participants. While some have dismissed this worry about undue inducement and argued that we should be paying participants more to avoid exploitation, we argue that this line of argument is based on a too narrow conception of undue inducement and does not fully appreciate the distinction between reimbursement, compensation, and financial incentives. On another, often overlooked concept of undue inducement, large incentives are an undue inducement when they are irresistible for people who do not want to participate and, thus, undermine voluntariness. This gives reason to limit the financial incentives to trial participants. We argue, furthermore, that large financial incentives could also be disproportionally attractive for people from economically marginalized groups and result in an unjust distribution of the burdens of research participation. We conclude that, while small sums of money are permissible as incentives, larger financial incentives should be avoided. We end by responding to the objection that keeping payments to participants small would be a form of exploitation. We argue that this argument does not apply to financial incentives. Unlike reimbursements and compensation, financial incentives are not payments to which participants can have a claim and, therefore, fall outside the scope of exploitation arguments.
It's you it's about! Exploring existential aspects on quality of life with myasthenia gravis.
Missel M, Witting N
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Jun · PMID 41452548 · Full text
This article is grounded in a phenomenological and autoethnographic approach, with the neurologist's remark, It's you it's about!, serving as an existential starting point. The aim of this text is to explore quality of l...
This article is grounded in a phenomenological and autoethnographic approach, with the neurologist's remark, It's you it's about!, serving as an existential starting point. The aim of this text is to explore quality of life as an existential challenge and opportunity when living with the chronic illness myasthenia gravis, drawing on lived experience and existential philosophy. Through three existential anecdotes based on the first author's experiences with myasthenia gravis, the tension between the body's limitations and the patient's desire to continue living meaningfully, as well as the role of the clinician in supporting the patient's process, is illuminated. Each anecdote is followed by a philosophical reflection - from glimpse to resonance - which deepens the exploration of the complex dimensions of quality of life. The article examines key themes such as; Running, existential positioning, and holding on to quality of life; The stoic trust that sustains a patient's quality of life; and The restoration of clarity and direction for quality of life - one that is not measured, but felt, held, and sustained in relation. By exploring these dimensions, the article proposes a shift from traditional, measurable outcomes to a broader understanding of quality of life that transcends physical symptoms.
What can Adorno's understanding of aesthetic experience offer for the health and medical humanities?
Rajala AI
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Mar · PMID 41432887 · Full text
The concept of aesthetic experience is essential to understand the ways people interact with, immerse in, and interpret aesthetic objects, such as artworks, literature, or natural beauty. Aesthetic experience is also imp...
The concept of aesthetic experience is essential to understand the ways people interact with, immerse in, and interpret aesthetic objects, such as artworks, literature, or natural beauty. Aesthetic experience is also important within the health and medical humanities in explaining the effects and benefits of engaging with art, but philosophical perspectives on the concept within the field are surprisingly scarce. This article addresses this research gap by delving into one such perspective in the Western philosophical tradition that draws on the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno. I argue that Adorno's understanding of aesthetic experience offers valuable support for the critical turn in the health and medical humanities, which seeks to move beyond the clinical encounter toward the broader societal context of health and illness. Adorno's relevance lies in his vehement argumentation against an instrumentalising understanding of aesthetic experience. According to Adorno, the experiencing subject ought not to be understood simply as someone who judges between good and bad art, beautiful and ugly, or aesthetic and nonaesthetic, because such judgements can ultimately be reduced to arguments about art as having or not having exchange value. Instead, aesthetic experience is something more profound: a mode of knowledge rarely accessible through other means, in which the experiencing subject enters into the artwork and activates its own subjectivity. This argument offers the health and medical humanities insight into how art might be approached in relation to its potentially transformative role in society.
Social aspects of privacy in technologically assisted dementia care.
Buhr E
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Mar · PMID 41417441 · Full text
Technical assistance systems (TA) are increasingly used in the care of people with dementia (PwD). A central ethical concern in this context is the potential violation of privacy. However, the prevailing debate – shaped...
Technical assistance systems (TA) are increasingly used in the care of people with dementia (PwD). A central ethical concern in this context is the potential violation of privacy. However, the prevailing debate – shaped largely by liberal traditions – tends to conceptualize privacy in terms of individual autonomy. Yet PwD progressively lose their capacity for autonomous decision-making, and their everyday lives are shaped by close caregiving relationships. This study adopts an empirically informed medical ethics approach to examine the value of privacy for PwD and the role of interpersonal relationships in this context. Drawing on 12 interviews with PwD and 15 with caregiving relatives, the findings show that privacy remains a meaningful value for PwD, independently of individual autonomy, and is closely tied to their well-being. Moreover, privacy and relationships emerge as mutually constitutive: on the one hand, privacy supports the maintenance of meaningful relationships; on the other, close relationships can enable PwD to experience and preserve privacy. These insights carry concrete ethical implications for the design and implementation of TA systems, as well as for the medical care of PwD.
Intergenerational healthcare ethics: considering conceptualizations of generations and their collective and temporal dimensions.
Ellerich-Groppe N, Bozzaro C, Koesling D … +3 more , Rehmann-Sutter C, Schicktanz S, Schweda M
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Mar · PMID 41396336 · Full text
Current challenges in medicine and healthcare raise new questions regarding the moral relations between generations, thus highlighting the increasing relevance of intergenerational perspectives in healthcare ethics. Howe...
Current challenges in medicine and healthcare raise new questions regarding the moral relations between generations, thus highlighting the increasing relevance of intergenerational perspectives in healthcare ethics. However, the underlying notions of generations often remain vague and heterogeneous. This contribution aims to clarify the scope of conceptual meanings of 'generation' through explication and differentiation in order to advance the analytical potential of intergenerational perspectives in healthcare ethics. We argue that the concept of generations needs theoretical elaboration with regard to the dimensions of collectivity and temporality. We first introduce three approaches towards the theoretical conceptualization of generations: a genealogical, a chronological, and a socio-cultural approach. Regardless of their differences, all three essentially share an understanding of generations as collectives situated in time. Accordingly, we then examine the scope of underlying notions of collectivity and temporality, touching upon fundamental ontological, epistemological, and moral philosophical implications. We distinguish a skeptical individualist, an aggregationist, and an entity view of collectivity, as well as a formal, linear, a subjective, existential-narrative, and a socio-cultural understanding of temporality. The combination of these dimensions allows the development of a systematic matrix of conceptions of generations and intergenerational relations in healthcare ethics whose analytical potential we illustrate with regard to three paradigmatic examples. We provide a systematic summary of our considerations and outline a research agenda that addresses desiderata for intergenerational perspectives in healthcare ethics, encompassing clinical ethics, research ethics, and public health ethics, as well as meta-ethical questions.
Algorithmic gaze and subject occlusion: a medical ethical critique of artificial intelligence diagnosis and treatment from a foucaultian perspective.
Dai Y, Guo S
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Jun · PMID 41396335 · Publisher ↗
This paper develops a Foucauldian analysis of artificial intelligence (AI) in medical diagnosis, arguing that AI introduces an "algorithmic gaze" that reshapes the epistemic and moral structure of clinical practice. By c...
This paper develops a Foucauldian analysis of artificial intelligence (AI) in medical diagnosis, arguing that AI introduces an "algorithmic gaze" that reshapes the epistemic and moral structure of clinical practice. By converting illness narratives into data while generating forms of simulated empathy, AI systems reorder how patients become visible, intelligible, and governable within medical discourse. These developments produce three structural tensions: first, algorithmic opacity alters the conditions under which informed consent, contestation, and responsibility can meaningfully operate; second, simulated empathy appears to acknowledge suffering while subtly directing patients' expressive possibilities; and third, the delegation of emotional engagement to AI fragments the unity of care traditionally embodied in the clinician-patient relationship.Rather than treating these shifts as technologically inevitable, the paper argues that their ethical significance depends on institutional design. Four directions for reconstruction are proposed: securing identifiable responsibility and human-overridable decision pathways; integrating algorithmic outputs into dialogical clinical communication; adopting participatory data governance and strengthening algorithmic literacy; and grounding AI development in a renewed conception of medical humanism that guides design from the outset. The analysis concludes that AI can support, rather than erode, the moral foundations of medicine only if embedded within institutional arrangements that sustain autonomy, dignity, and relational understanding.
Open-ended eudemonism in healthcare: epistemological and procedural challenges.
Racine E
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Mar · PMID 41364312 · Publisher ↗
There is considerable interest in moving ethics theory and methods in healthcare and biomedical research settings toward more engaging practices. This is the chief goal of contemporary open eudemonism which calls for a f...
There is considerable interest in moving ethics theory and methods in healthcare and biomedical research settings toward more engaging practices. This is the chief goal of contemporary open eudemonism which calls for a focus on human flourishing and encourages the use of participatory and dialogical methods to support progress in this direction. This is notably taking the form of diverse approaches and interventions inspired by pragmatism and hermeneutics where ethics grows more organically, and moral learning is valued beyond mere ethical compliance. However, open eudemonism faces numerous epistemological and procedural challenges. The former concern potential challenges with the idea of open and participatory accounts of human flourishing (e.g., ethics agreement on human flourishing is unachievable; skepticism about the contribution of ethics to human flourishing) itself while the latter concern the actual ability to enact such an orientation in practice (e.g., motivation for human flourishing; ethics leadership and the role of the ethicist in open-ended eudemonism). Both sets of challenges require attention and responses in a fuller defense of the promises of this orientation in healthcare, in biomedical research settings, and beyond.
Relational rehabilitation: competencies and qualities needed in psychosocial rehabilitation when responding to hope and hopelessness.
Nejst CH, Bredewold F, Baart A … +1 more , Glintborg C
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Mar · PMID 41359194 · Publisher ↗
This study explores how rehabilitation professionals engage with the dynamic nature of hope in acquired brain injury rehabilitation, identifying the qualities and competencies needed to respond with care. Using a qualita...
This study explores how rehabilitation professionals engage with the dynamic nature of hope in acquired brain injury rehabilitation, identifying the qualities and competencies needed to respond with care. Using a qualitative design, data were collected through focus groups and individual interviews with cross-disciplinary professionals at a Danish rehabilitation centre. Reflexive thematic analysis revealed four distinct episodes of hope, each demanding a different response. Drawing on the concepts of 'relational caring' and 'practicing presence', and engaging with empirical data, essential qualities and competencies were revealed: being present, attuned, giving and sharing time, moving along, faithfully staying with, and embracing powerlessness and uncertainty. We conclude that current rehabilitation competency frameworks, such as Wade (Clin Rehabil 34(8):995-1003, 2020) and the Rehabilitation Competency Framework as reported by World Health Organization (Rehabilitation Competency Framework, World Health Organization, Geneva, 2020), fail to capture the more nuanced competencies required to address hopelessness in rehabilitation practice. This indicates that acknowledging and validating the full dynamics of hope and hopelessness within the frameworks shaping rehabilitation practice is essential to recognising the comprehensive range of qualities and competencies needed by rehabilitation professionals. This encompasses the capacity to navigate the shifting nature of hope as well as endure and 'stay with' the person in need during hardship. Specifically, education of rehabilitation professionals could gain from integrating the theoretical framework from relational caring and presence theory as a supplement to the International Classification of Functioning, disability and Health (ICF), enabling professionals to effectively navigate the psychosocial and existential dimensions of hope in their practice.
Making grandchildren. Is there an interest in becoming a grandparent?
Cutas D
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Mar · PMID 41288944 · Full text
In recent decades, with the advancement of technologies facilitating reproduction, parents have been able to make decisions regarding their childrens' reproductive potential: to preserve their fertility when threatened b...
In recent decades, with the advancement of technologies facilitating reproduction, parents have been able to make decisions regarding their childrens' reproductive potential: to preserve their fertility when threatened by genetic conditions or medical treatment; to use their gametes or embryos to make grandchildren; or even to collect their gametes posthumously and then use them to make grandchildren. While these interventions tend to be framed in terms of the interests of the children themselves, parents are not indifferent as to whether they become grandparents. At the same time, while the interest in becoming a parent and parents' interests have been discussed extensively in reproductive and family ethics, grandparents and grandparenthood have been at best marginal in this growing literature. Against this background, I ask the question whether parents have an interest in becoming grandparents - and if so, which claims this interest generates against other parties (such as children themselves, healthcare professionals, or the state), if any. I explore possible paths towards conceptualising such an interest and the degree to which it could ground a claim to facilitate its fulfilment.
Totalitarian technics: the hidden cost of AI scribes in healthcare.
Brosnahan H
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Mar · PMID 41284135 · Publisher ↗
Artificial intelligence (AI) scribes-systems that record and summarise patient-clinician interactions-are promoted as solutions to administrative overload. This paper argues that their significance lies not in efficiency...
Artificial intelligence (AI) scribes-systems that record and summarise patient-clinician interactions-are promoted as solutions to administrative overload. This paper argues that their significance lies not in efficiency gains but in how they reshape medical attention itself. Offering a conceptual analysis, it situates AI scribes within a broader philosophical lineage concerned with the externalisation of human thought and skill. Drawing on Iain McGilchrist's hemisphere theory and Lewis Mumford's philosophy of technics, the paper examines how technology embodies and amplifies a particular mode of attention. AI scribes, it contends, exemplify the dominance of a left-hemispheric, calculative mindset that privileges the measurable and procedural over the intuitive and relational. As this mode of attention becomes further embedded in medical practice, it risks narrowing the field of care, eroding clinical expertise, and reducing physicians to operators within an increasingly mechanised system.
Lifetime and world-time in accelerated medicine. An essay on the consolation of synchronisation.
Wiesing U
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Mar · PMID 41269580 · Full text
The essay examines how prominent scientists, politicians, and managers respond to the condition of human existence that a human being is only a short time in the long time of the world. In connection with the accelerated...
The essay examines how prominent scientists, politicians, and managers respond to the condition of human existence that a human being is only a short time in the long time of the world. In connection with the accelerated medicine and its predicted progress, they segment the future and imagine themselves at a new stage of humanity. They strive for a. privileged relationship to the world by claiming to conclude humanity's prehistory in the foreseeable future, if possible, in their own lifetime. They are trying to synchronise their lifetime with the world-time. In this way they hope for consolation, draw on old religious motifs and attribute religious elements to medicine.
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