Advances in Medical Ethics
Open Access

Implementation of Medical Philosophy in Practice and the Application of Technical Procedures in Medical Ethics

Darren Bruce^{* *}Correspondence: Darren Bruce, Department of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences, Griffith University, Brisbane City, Australia, Email:

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Methodical examination of issues involving the fundamental nature of reality, knowledge, and value is known as Medical Philosophy. This overlaps with bioethics more explicitly in areas of epistemology, metaphysics, and medical ethics. Physicians and philosophers disagreed about whether or not the philosophy of medicine should be treated as a separate discipline from late twentieth century. Bioethics is often seen as a separate topic; hence it is not covered in this entry, despite the fact that ethics and values are part of many issues addressed within the philosophy of medicine. It examines essential elements of medical practice that regularly come up in bioethics, such as ideas of sickness, philosophy of medicine nevertheless serves as a foundation for many discussions within the field of bioethics.

The broad philosophy of science, in particular the understandings of explanation, causation, and experimentation, as well as discussions over the practical uses of scientific knowledge, have benefited greatly from the philosophy of medicine. Finally, conversations about approaches and objectives in both research and practice in the medical and health sciences have benefited from the philosophy of medicine. Although there is a growing body of work on the philosophy of non-Western and alternative medical practices, this entry largely focuses on philosophy of medicine in the Western tradition. While incorporating pertinent scholarly writings from different disciplinary viewpoints, it places a strong emphasis on philosophical literature. Healthcare professionals should weigh the advantages and disadvantages of their choices. They need to work in the patient's best interests. They must work to improve the health of their patients and act in the patient's best interests at all times.

One component of this Philosophy of Medicine is to examines conceptual and logical issues in medicine that may have an impact on clinical care and health policy, such as how we define health, illness, and disease, how we define life and death, how we classify disease, how we distinguish between a symptom, a sign, and a syndrome, how we think about the problem of causation in disease, and how we approach diagnosis logically using techniques like eliminative diagnosis. The second part, known as medical ethics, focuses on the moral dimensions of medicine and has a significant influence on medical law and policy. Specific moral issues like abortion, euthanasia, confidentiality, refusal of treatment, reproductive technology, genetic testing, ownership of biological materials, healthcare rights, and healthcare disparities are well-known, but medical ethics also includes many issues involving new technologies as well as more general issues like the role of medicine in society, the level of patient responsibility for their own conditions, the degree to which medicine should be practiced in accordance with the best available science.

In addition to conceptual analysis and logic, experimental philosophical methods involving social psychology and statistical tools are used to study these concerns in medical ethics and philosophy. A third aspect is Moral Psychology of Medicine which examines how actual moral decisions are made at the bedside and at the policy level using empirical and conceptual methods. It does this by examining the psychology of values, moral emotions, and the effects of medical technology on causal inferences, assessments of treatment efficacy, and decisions regarding life and death.

There is a lot of medical knowledge that is necessary for the practice of medicine, but it is equally or more important how this knowledge is perceived and utilized. Evidence-based medicine is a choice that has both a practical and philosophical basis. Thus, philosophy complements medicine admirably, just as it does with every other science or art. The purpose of both science and art in medicine is to lessen human suffering, thus it is more than just a science. It is challenging but necessary for health professionals to put medical philosophy into practice. Life principles should be implemented in daily clinical practice rather than remaining a purely academic concept. It is without a doubt essential to educate medical philosophy to health practitioners, and its application in clinical practice has the highest moral and societal importance. Clinical practice becomes ideal when philosophical concepts are effectively used for the benefit of the practitioner, the patient, and society.