Taking Subjectivity into Account

From Truth Telling to Truth in the Making: A Paradigm Shift in Communication with Cancer Patients

“…Illness consists of more-or-less objectively quanti fi able data that are subjectively lived, intersubjectively interpreted, and socially constructed. By contrast, the objective dimension of the person's illness, generally referred to as the "disease," consists of measurable anatomical, physiological, biochemical, molecular, and genetic changes that are independent of the patient's will [ 19 ] . The changes that make up the disease occur in a speci fi c human being, where body, psyche, and mind are united as a whole.…”

“…Despite the increasingly recognized role of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and of uncertainty, ambiguity, and vagueness in the contemporary philosophy of science, the strict biomedical view of disease, based and focused on objective quanti fi able data obtained generally by ever-improving technological means, still pervades Western medicine and medical training [17][18][19] . When the subjective and intersubjective elements of illness are not taken into proper account, the illness is rei fi ed.…”

Pedagogy of Ignorance

“…First, ignorance is closely related to the situatedness of the knower, i.e., knowers' position in time and space and their personal history of experience shape what they know and do not know. As Code (1993) argues, 'knowers are always somewhere-and at once limited and enabled by the specificities of their locations' (p. 39). Alcoff (2007) cites an example of an operating room at a hospital where a support person for a patient and the medical personnel may have differing abilities to understand the information displayed on the monitoring devices.…”

Perspectives on Evidence-Based Healthcare for Women

“…35 Negotiating the Conflict over Evidence-Based Women's Health Feminist scholars in science studies and the medical humanities have paid significant attention to scientific research because of the recognized sociopolitical stakes of knowledge and knowledge production. [36][37][38] Women have historically suffered numerous exclusions in the name of science, for instance, in biological and psychological explanations of women's supposed cognitive, emotional, and moral inferiority to men. In some cases, these conclusions came from blatantly bad science: false conjectures or poor inferences from the data, for example, to support sexist political agendas.…”