Do doctors fix patients? Or do they heal them? For all of modern
medicine's many successes, discontent with the quality of patient care
has combined with a host of new developments, from aging populations to
the resurgence of infectious diseases, which challenge medicine's
overreliance on narrowly mechanistic and technical methods of
explanation and intervention, or "fixing' patients. The need for a
better balance, for more humane "healing" rationales and practices that
attend to the social and environmental aspects of health and illness and
the experiencing person, is more urgent than ever. Yet, in public health
and bioethics, the fields best positioned to offer countervailing values
and orientations, the dominant approaches largely extend and reinforce
the reductionism and individualism of biomedicine.
The collected essays in To Fix or To Heal do more than document the
persistence of reductionist approaches and the attendant extension of
medicalization to more and more aspects of our lives. The contributors
also shed valuable light on why reductionism has persisted and why more
holistic models, incorporating social and environmental factors, have
gained so little traction. The contributors examine the moral appeal of
reductionism, the larger rationalist dream of technological mastery, the
growing valuation of health, and the enshrining of individual
responsibility as the seemingly non-coercive means of intervention and
control. This paradigm-challenging volume advances new lines of
criticism of our dominant medical regime, even while proposing ways of
bringing medical practice, bioethics, and public health more closely
into line with their original goals. Precisely because of the centrality
of the biomedical approach to our society, the contributors argue,
challenging the reductionist model and its ever-widening effects is
perhaps the best way to press for a much-needed renewal of our ethical
and political discourse.
