The Phenomenology of Health and Illness (original) (raw)

A Defence of the Phenomenological Account of Health and Illness

Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 2019

A large slice of contemporary phenomenology of medicine has been devoted to developing an account of health and illness that pro- ceeds from the first-person perspective when attempting to under- stand the ill person in contrast and connection to the third-person perspective on his/her diseased body. A proof that this phenom- enological account of health and illness, represented by philo- sophers, such as Drew Leder, Kay Toombs, Havi Carel, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kevin Aho, and Fredrik Svenaeus, is becoming increas- ingly influential in philosophy of medicine and medical ethics is the criticism of it that has been voiced in some recent studies. In this article, two such critical contributions, proceeding from radic- ally different premises and backgrounds, are discussed: Jonathan Sholl’s naturalistic critique and Talia Welsh’s Nietzschean critique. The aim is to defend the phenomenological account and clear up misunderstandings about what it amounts to and what we should be able to expect from it.

Illness and two meanings of phenomenology

Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 2020

Background: When approaching medicine, phenomenology has at least two meanings that need to be distinguished in order to become relevant in its application to medical practice. Up to now, these two meanings have been overlapped by most of the scholarly literature. Therefore, the purpose of the article is to differentiate between them, thus endorsing their potential use in medical practice. Methods: The first meaning was instituted by Edmund Husserl and views phenomenology as transcendental, ie, as a transcendental rigorous science based on the unravelling of transcendental subjectivity/intersubjectivity. The second takes it more as a narrative enterprise, ie, as a description of personal subjective experience, thus seeming closer to other approaches to disease which can be found both in philosophy and other fields. Nevertheless, both provide advantages and disadvantages when it comes to approaching illness. Results: Neither of the two meanings can supersede the other and, consequently, neither of the two analogue forms of phenomenology can impose itself as the phenomenology of medicine. Conclusion: It is important to clarify the consequences of applying each of the two understandings of phenomenology to medicine in the context of its current development. Our present inquiry concerns not merely the disentanglement of the status of what today's scholarly literature calls phenomenology of medicine in relation to meanings of phenomenology, but also the limits of applying phenomenology to the field of medicine.

Phenomenology of Illness H.Carel, 2016 Oxford, Oxford University Press xi + 248 pp, $50.00 (hb)

Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2018

Havi Carel's new book is the culmination of over a decade of thinking about illness. Her engagement with the subject is both academic and personal. After being diagnosed with a life-limiting lung disease, Carel published a powerful reflection of her own experiences of illness in Illness: The Cry of the Flesh (Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2008), and has written a number of academic articles developing a phenomenology of illness since. The Phenomenology of Illness contains the best of both these approaches, blending together personal anecdote and rigorous philosophical analysis to deepen our understanding of what it means to be ill. Written for an academic audience, the book has two aims: 'to contribute to the understanding of illness through the use of philosophy, and to demonstrate the importance of illness for philosophy' (p. 2). What motivates a phenomenological approach to illness? Carel offers three rationales: as the study of lived experience, phenomenology is a natural approach to understanding the variety of illness experiences; it provides a non-prescriptive framework free of conceptual restrictions; and it underscores the centrality of the body to understanding human experience (p. 7). The structure of the book can be divided into roughly two sections. The first five chapters develop the general framework for a phenomenology of illness, with the final chapter in this half applying the framework to respiratory illness. The second section of the book explores the relationship between illness and other key philosophical topics, namely, wellbeing, death, and epistemic injustice. Thus, the structure aptly mirrors the two-part aim of her project, leveraging the conceptual tools of phenomenology to examine illness, and conversely, exploring how illness may illuminate traditional debates in philosophy. A brief note: many of our thoughts in this review developed during a term-long seminar on Carel's book. This was attended by philosophers (both analytic and continental), social scientists and clinical practitioners, among others. The value of Carel's project was evident throughout the discussions. The book not only reframed issues traditionally viewed under the scope of Anglo-American philosophy; it also offered a shared language and perspective for engagement between the social sciences, humanities, and the medical sciences. Carel's approach is based on a definition of illness as 'serious, chronic, and lifechanging ill health, as opposed to a cold or a bout of tonsillitis' (p. 2). Illness is something which changes the subject's way of being, in a way that a simple cold does not. Following others, Carel contrasts this with disease, whereby disease is seen as physiological dysfunction. The book makes great use of this distinction and it no doubt

Phenomenology and its application in medicine

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 32(1):33-46, 2011

Phenomenology is a useful methodology for describing and ordering experience. As such, phenomenology can be specifically applied to the first person experience of illness in order to illuminate this experience and enable health care providers to enhance their understanding of it. However, this approach has been underutilized in the philosophy of medicine as well as in medical training and practice. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of phenomenology to clinical medicine. In order to describe the experience of illness, we need a phenomenological approach that gives the body a central role and acknowledges the primacy of perception. I present such a phenomenological method and show how it could usefully illuminate the experience of illness through a set of concepts taken from Merleau-Ponty. His distinction between the biological body and the body as lived, analysis of the habitual body, and the notions of motor intentionality and intentional arc are used to capture the experience of illness. I then discuss the applications this approach could have in medicine. These include narrowing the gap between objective assessments of well-being in illness and subjective experiences which are varied and diverse; developing a more attuned dialogue between physicians and patients based on a thick understanding of illness; developing research methods that are informed by phenomenology and thus go beyond existing qualitative methods; and providing medical staff with a concrete understanding of the impact of illness on the life-world of patients.

Putting Phenomenology In Its Place: Some Limits of a Phenomenology of Medicine

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Phenomenology's Place in the Philosophy of Medicine

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 2021

With its rise in popularity, work in the phenomenology of medicine has also attracted its fair share of criticism. One such criticism maintains that since the phenomenology of medicine does nothing but describe the experience of illness, it offers nothing we cannot obtain more easily by deploying simpler qualitative research methods. Fredrik Svenaeus has pushed back against this charge, insisting that the phenomenology of medicine not only describes but also defines illness. Although I agree with Svenaeus’s claim that the phenomenology of medicine does more than merely describe what it’s like to be ill, once we acknowledge its more far-reaching theoretical aspirations, we see that it faces an even more difficult set of objections. Taking a cue from recent work by Rebecca Kukla, Russell Powell, and Eric Scarffe, I argue that the phenomenology of medicine could answer these objections by developing an institutional definition of illness. This would not only allow the phenomenology of medicine to answer its critics, but it would do so in a way that preserves its major achievements and extends its reach within the philosophy of medicine.