Philosophers on Medicine
Activity Overview
Episode publication activity over the past year
Episodes
Philosophy of Medicine on COVID-19
28 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
During the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists and policymakers have responded with unprecedented solutions. The pandemic has also forced a rethinking of sc...
Sean Valles - Race in epidemiology and medicine
06 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
There is renewed research and attention to race in epidemiology and medicine, partly owing to developments in population genetics. Yet race is a conte...
Jacob Stegenga - Medical Nihilism
01 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Medical Nihilism. Is it vestige of a bygone age in medicine beset with treatments like mercury and bloodletting? Or the proper conclusion of a line of...
Miriam Solomon - Expert consensus in medicine
04 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In medicine, consensus statements abound. They’re issued by government agencies and professional societies as the official word on the science and p...
Alex Broadbent - The causes of disease
02 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The cause of tuberculosis is the germ Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Meanwhile, the causes of heart disease are variable: smoking, sedentary lifestyle, b...
Evidence-based medicine
06 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Evidence-based medicine or EBM was introduced in the early 1990s as a move to increase medicine’s uptake of published scientific evidence, especiall...
Mental disorders and the DSM
12 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Mental disorders cause suffering for many and pose challenges for the psychiatric profession. Throughout history, the way that society and psychiatry ...
Marc Ereshefsky - Primer on health and disease
06 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Health and disease are two concepts that dominate our lives. Analyzing these concepts has also dominated much of the discussion in the philosophy of m...
Clinical Judgment
02 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The mastery of clinical judgment is what separates the expert clinician from the novice. Yet clinical judgment remains somewhat obscure. Is it a tacit...
Matthew Parrott - Delusions
04 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Delusions are often defined as fixed false beliefs. They run contrary to common sense or counter-evidence that would convince any rational person, lik...
Elselijn Kingma - Metaphysics of pregnancy
07 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Often, when philosophical questions are asked about pregnancy, they concern ethical problems about abortion, surrogacy or assisted conception. But the...
Mary Walker - Overdiagnosis and the definition of disease
02 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In recent years, physicians and health scientists have become increasingly concerned about overdiagnosis, the problem of diagnosing too many people as...
Jeremy Simon - Are diseases real?
05 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
I had a cold last winter, and so did countless other people. We had sore throats and runny noses and maybe even a cough. At first glance, it seems har...
Maya Goldenberg - Vaccine hesitancy and public trust in healthcare
06 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Vaccine hesitancy is a cautious or critical stance towards vaccines. By some estimates, it is on the rise among the public. Medicine and public health...
Miriam Solomon - Pick your medicine: evidence-based, narrative, or precision?
23 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Evidence-based medicine. Narrative medicine. Precision medicine. Are these the names of new schools of medicine? Or of new models for medical research...
Alex Broadbent - What is medicine?
27 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
What is medicine? That question certainly has the ring of a paradigmatic philosophical problem. Yet surprisingly few contemporary philosophers have de...
Philosophers on Medicine - A New Frontier
27 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Best Physician is also a Philosopher. This is the title of a book by Galen, the famous physician of Antiquity. Was Galen right? Or is it that for ...