There is a growing tendency for medicine to be used not to prevent or heal illnesses, but to fulfil individual personal wishes such as wishes for enhanced work performance, better social skills, children with specific characteristics, stress relief, a certain appearance or a better sex life. While recognizing that the subject of wish-fulfilling medicine may vary greatly and that it may employ very different techniques, this article argues that wish-fulfilling medicine can be described as a cohesive phenomenon with distinctive features. (...) Following a few examples of well established wish-fulfilling medical practices and a brief definition of the phenomenon, both theoretical aspects and ethical implications of such practices are discussed and the question is raised how wish-fulfilling medicine should be evaluated from an ethical point of view. It is concluded that modern medicine is currently ill equipped to provide reasons why wish-fulfilling medicine should be banned or discouraged. The phenomenon of wish-fulfilling medicine serves as a prime example of the vagueness of the descriptive and the lack of decisive orientation of the normative categories employed in modern medicine. (shrink)

The following article presents preliminary reflections on a processual theory of health and disease. It does this by steering the discussion more toward an ontology of organisms rather than conceptual analysis of the semantic content of the terms “health” and “disease.” In the first section, four meta-theoretical assumptions of the traditional debate are identified and alternative approaches to the problems are presented. Afterwards, the view that health and disease are constituted by a dynamic relation between demands imposed on an organism (...) and individual presuppositions for adequate response is developed. In the last section, the paper takes stock of three possible objections to and clarifies some implications of this approach to the notions of health and disease. (shrink)