Personalized Medicine, Genomics and Enhancement: Monuments to Neoliberalism

Kowalski, Charles J.

doi:10.11648/j.ajcem.20170503.14

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…They seemed oblivious to the fact that "-ism" is not actually a word (Note 1), but since we will want to use it as one, we feel compelled to provide a definition: a passionate belief in some universal truth. Thus, for example, adding to the above list, neoliberalism (c.f., Kowalski & Mrdjenovich, 2017) denotes a Six more definitions of scientism were provided by Thalos (2017). These overlap with those given by Stenmark and Boudrry and Pigliucci, and can be characterized by the belief in the universal applicability of the scientific method and approach, and the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning to the exclusion of other viewpoints (cf.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Scientism Infiltrated Medicine and Distorted Clinical Practice: Scientism May Be Hazardous to Your Health

Kowalski¹,

Fessell²,

Mrdjenovich³

et al. 2020

JRPH

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Scientism can be defined as a passionate belief in the universal applicability of the scientific method and approach, and the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning, to the exclusion of other viewpoints. At this level of generality, it is not difficult to show that scientism poses some distinct dangers, putting a damper as it does on the validity and usefulness of other kinds of knowledge and/or ways of learning. But this has not dissuaded some from thinking that scientism might still be of value in medicine. The popularity of evidence based medicine (EMB) attests to the fact that many so believe. We argue, to the contrary, that clinical practice relies on other kinds of knowledge, and that this is attainable only if we admit consideration of other kinds of learning. We conclude that scientism may be dangerous to your health.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Scientism Infiltrated Medicine and Distorted Clinical Practice: Scientism May Be Hazardous to Your Health

Kowalski¹,

Fessell²,

Mrdjenovich³

et al. 2020

JRPH

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Max Ritvo’s Precision Poetry

Choksey

2020

The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science

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This essay reads Max Ritvo’s poetry through a chronology of precision biomedicine: imaging, diagnosis, and treatment. Ritvo’s construction of a patient-consumer avatar in his poetry reflects his position at a biomedical frontier, while poetic form becomes a way of retrieving bodies from a logic of substitution and surrogacy. A body lying under the weight of relentless, and relentlessly variable, imaging is catapulted through memory to a place by the sea in “The Curve.” In “Poem to My Litter,” the speaker addresses the laboratory mice injected with his tumors, drawing himself closer to them through their shared imprisonment in bodies on their way out of life, and suspending a bioeconomy embedded in a moral economy of sacrifice and faith. If precision medicine depends on making the analogical and metaphorical into common consensus—images that stand in for bodies, codes that stand in for disease—then Ritvo upends its neat architecture. He sticks instead with the messiness of bodies failing to meet an elusive salvation.

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