Phenomenology in medicine’s main contribution is to present a first-person narrative of illness, in an effort to aid medicine in reaching an accurate disease diagnosis and establishing a personal relationship with patients whose lived experience changes dramatically when severe disease and disabling condition is confirmed. Once disease is diagnosed, the lived experience of illness is reconstructed into a living-with-disease narrative that medicine’s biological approach has widely neglected. Key concepts like health, sickness, illness, disease and the clinical encounter are being diversely (...) and ambiguously used, leading to distortions in socio-medical practices such as medicalization, pharmaceuticalization, emphasis on surveillance medicine. Current definitions of these concepts as employed in phenomenology of medicine are revised, concluding that more stringent semantics ought to reinforce an empirical phenomenological or postphenomenological approach. (shrink)

Summary Care and cure have been described as different kinds of ethical approaches to clinical situations. Female concerns in nursing care have been contrasted with masculine, cure orientated physician's attitudes. Ethics in such different voices may have sociologic determinants, but they do not represent intrinsic distinctions. Medicine has shown a divergent development, on the one hand stressing cure in a deterministic and instrumental way, on the other hand being aware that disease is as much a pathographic as a biographic, care‐requiring (...) existential situation. Disease is a breakdown of the living organism, to be cured by therapeutic efforts, but it is also the distressing failure of the lived body, requiring concern and care. Based on Lévinas’ ethics of encounter, it is suggested that any interpersonal relatedness is based on concern for the other, being grounded on an essentially ethical interaction. The clinical encounter is a paradigm of such ethics‐based relationships, which necessarily builds on awareness of the other qua other, and is concerned with fulfilling the therapeutic mandate. Caring for the other means doing one's best to help her/him, so that care and cure are inextricably interwoven, although care is the more fundamental form of human relatedness. Thus, neither gender nor professional tasks can allow for a caring attitude to develop without curing concerns, just as trying to cure without caring is unthinkable. (shrink)