This paper distinguishes between the uses of empowerment across different contexts in healthcare policy and health promotion, providing a model for the ethical and political scrutiny of those uses. We argue that the controversies currently engendered by empowerment are better understood by means of a historical distinction between two concepts of empowerment, namely, what we call the radical empowerment approach and the new wave of empowerment. Building on this distinction, we present a research agenda for ethicists and policy makers, highlighting three domains of controversy raised by the new wave of empowerment, namely: (1) the relationship between empowerment and paternalistic interferences on the part of professionals; (2) the evaluative commitment of empowerment strategies to the achievement of health-related goals; and (3) the problems arising from the emphasis on responsibility for health in recent uses of empowerment. Finally, we encourage the explicit theorisation of these moral controversies as a necessary step for the development and implementation of ethically legitimate empowerment processes.
Environmental epigenetics has attracted attention in the media owing to its potential for informing public health policies. It is therefore important to take its societal implications into consideration by cooperating with researchers in the social sciences and humanities.
BackgroundEpigenetics is a burgeoning field of contemporary biosciences, which has attracted a lot of interest both in biomedical and in social sciences Sources of dataUnsystematic literature analysis and retrospective mapping of highly cited work (source: Web of Science core collection) in the social sciences and humanities engaging with epigenetics Areas of agreementEpigenetics poses no new ethical issue over and above those discussed in relation to genetics Areas of controversyHowever, it encourages a different framing and reflexivity on some of the commonly held categories in the moral uptake of scientific discoveries. Growing pointsEpigenetics presents us with normative questions that touch upon privacy, responsibility for individual health and for the wellbeing of future generations, as well as matters of health justice and equality of opportunities. Areas timely for developing researchEpigenetic thinking could help us adjust and refine the problem-frames and categories that inform our ethical and political questions with a complex biosocial description of situations, of persons or actions
This paper questions different conceptions of Medical Humanities in order to provide a clearer understanding of what they are and why they matter. Building upon former attempts, we defend a conception of Medical Humanities as a humanistic problem-based approach to medicine aiming at influencing its nature and practice. In particular, we discuss three main conceptual issues regarding the overall nature of this discipline: (i) a problem-driven approach to Medical Humanities; (ii) the need for an integration of Medical Humanities into medicine; (iii) the methodological requirements that could render Medical Humanities an effective framework for medical decision-making.
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