A pragmatist recovery of health: Rethinking the limits of biomedicine

TL;DRAbstract

This project applies insights primarily from classical American pragmatism to pressing contemporary debates regarding the biomedical model of health. More specifically, it focuses on the ethical implications of theoretical frameworks in philosophy of medicine and the technologies that enable their practical application in clinical practice, with a particular focus on the relationship between quantitative and existential-qualitative dimensions of health and our conceptions of them. Whereas mainstream biomedical ethical debate tends to be limited to applications of established ethical paradigms to biomedical problems, thereby effectively taking the biomedical conceptualization of health for granted, I argue that biomedicine, as articulated by the biostatistical theory of health (BST) and practiced by evidence-based medicine (EBM), in presupposing a reductive, strictly quantitative view of the human person, carries with it some ethically undesirable practical consequences. The dissertatio

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