美國醫學模式轉變的跨文化審視——兼評Jeffrey P. Bishop 西方醫學模式轉變觀念

Intercultural Perspectives on American Medical Models

Abstract

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract in English only.

Bishop’s paper shows that the dominant model of medicine has changed in line the prevailing medical worldview since the late 19th century, when biomedicine become the established model. With the growth of scientism in medicine, biomedicine has suffered a quality-of-care crisis in recent years. Patients have become more like machines to be managed and manipulated than human beings to be cared for. The crisis involves controversies over whether the patient is a body or a person, about the doctor-patient relationship, and about the nature of disease and health. The biomedical model envisions the patient as a mechanical body that is composed of separate parts, rendering medicine cold, impersonal, dictatorial, and mechanical. Other models have been proposed in an attempt to change the situation in the West. However, as Bishop argues in his paper, each proposed reform movement is doomed to fail because none departs from mechanistic, reductive scientism. We cannot develop an appropriate medical model without changing the inhumane character or secularist tendency of the dominant biomedical model.

DOWNLOAD HISTORY | This article has been downloaded 39 times in Digital Commons before migrating into this platform.