Today's medicine is spiritually deflated and morally adrift; this book
explains why and offers an ethical framework to renew and guide
practitioners in fulfilling their profession to heal.
What is medicine and what is it for? What does it mean to be a good
doctor? Answers to these questions are essential both to the practice of
medicine and to understanding the moral norms that shape that practice.
The Way of Medicine articulates and defends an account of medicine and
medical ethics meant to challenge the reigning provider of services
model, in which clinicians eschew any claim to know what is good for a
patient and instead offer an array of "health care services" for the
sake of the patient's subjective well-being. Against this trend, Farr
Curlin and Christopher Tollefsen call for practitioners to recover what
they call the Way of Medicine, which offers physicians both a path out
of the provider of services model and also the moral resources necessary
to resist the various political, institutional, and cultural forces that
constantly push practitioners and patients into thinking of their
relationship in terms of economic exchange.
Curlin and Tollefsen offer an accessible account of the ancient ethical
tradition from which contemporary medicine and bioethics has departed.
Their investigation, drawing on the scholarship of Leon Kass, Alasdair
MacIntyre, and John Finnis, leads them to explore the nature of medicine
as a practice, health as the end of medicine, the doctor-patient
relationship, the rule of double effect in medical practice, and a
number of clinical ethical issues from the beginning of life to its end.
In the final chapter, the authors take up debates about conscience in
medicine, arguing that rather than pretending to not know what is good
for patients, physicians should contend conscientiously for the
patient's health and, in so doing, contend conscientiously for good
medicine. The Way of Medicine is an intellectually serious yet
accessible exploration of medical practice written for medical students,
health care professionals, and students and scholars of bioethics and
medical ethics.
