Deep issues need a different kind of thinking

This module will consider some deep questions that lie at the heart of healthcare. This session starts with the question: what is an illness? What, if anything, do all illnesses have in common? But whilst the question is an important one for the first half of this module, our interest today is in how one might answer it.

One answer might be through scientific and empirical research. It is just about conceivable (although actually very unlikely) that every illness might have or have had a common mechanism or involve (or have involved) a common kind of breakdown of bodily or mental mechanism. But in order to investigate or to check this, one would already need to know which conditions to examine (to check that they did have just the common mechanism).

That is, one would already need to know, or at least have a good idea, which were the illnesses. If so, an empirical or scientific investigation of illnesses presupposes by a grasp of what illness is. And if all that is true, we first need to get clear about the very concept of illness. That calls for a different kind of thinking and reflection: philosophical analysis.

The session covers some helpful distinctions for thinking about some of the concepts on which good healthcare depends.

Reading: Two sections from

• Fulford, K.W.M., Thornton, T. and Graham, G. (2006) Oxford Textbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Next session.