The medical aspect and the existential dimension of illness: some bioethical reflexions

Abstract

According to the «classic» notion, the purpose of medicine was helping preserve and recover health; understanding health as physical, emotional and vital wellbeing, influenced by material actions, as well as supernatural and cosmologic inflows. During the Renaissance, modern science offered its knowledge to medicine, which stopped considering supernatural and cosmic inflows. In addition, the Cartesian notion of Dualism reduced medicine to look exclusively into the body construed as a machine according to proposed models based on different sciences. This physicalist and analytical perspectives have provided for significant achievements. However, illness implies, as far as the experience lived by the patient is concerned, aspects of existential discomfort, fragility, dependence, loss of identity which oftentimes medicine disregards for being subjective. This mistake should be avoided by supplementing medical expertise with the several sources offered by philosophy, arts, religion, which allow the sick to find inside themselves the support required to give meaning and value to their lives in their actual conditions.