{"title":"Chronic illness as transformative activity.","authors":"Victoria Paul","doi":"10.1007/s11019-025-10260-z","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s11019-025-10260-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Laurie A. Paul (2014) developed the concept of transformative experience. In describing transformative experience as an experience that is both epistemically and personally transformative, she argues that transformative experience challenges the traditional model of rational decision making. Her concept of transformative experiences has been expanded to the field of illness. It has been argued that illness is a transformative experience because it fulfills Paul's criteria for a transformative experience (Carel et al. 2016; Carel and Kidd 2020). Conceptualizing illness as a transformative experience would have far-reaching implications for the agency and for the rational decision-making process of ill persons. In considering these implications, this article questions the assumption that illness is a transformative experience and proposes that illness, especially when it is chronic, can be a transformative activity, in the sense that Agnes Callard (2020), introduced us to the concept of transformative activity. The article argues that conceptualizing (chronic) illness as a transformative activity strengthens the ill person's agency and ability to learn to live with the illness.</p>","PeriodicalId":47449,"journal":{"name":"Medicine Health Care and Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":"177-184"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12103311/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143651454","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lester Darryl Geneviève, Tenzin Wangmo, Helene Seaward, Mohamed Amine Bouchlaghem, Sarah Blacker, Félix Pageau
{"title":"ARIE: A Health Equity Framework for Public Health Interventions Informed by Critical Race Theory and Critical Gerontology.","authors":"Lester Darryl Geneviève, Tenzin Wangmo, Helene Seaward, Mohamed Amine Bouchlaghem, Sarah Blacker, Félix Pageau","doi":"10.1080/15265161.2024.2433419","DOIUrl":"10.1080/15265161.2024.2433419","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Older racialized minorities were particularly vulnerable during the last pandemic due to the interlocking influences of structural racism and ageism, which are often disregarded in public health planning. This oversight not only compromises the social justice and health equity goals of public health efforts but it also calls for a more inclusive approach that systematically addresses these deficiencies at every stage of a public health response. To achieve this, we propose <i>Age- and Race-conscious Interventions done Equitably</i> (ARIE), a novel analytical framework grounded in critical race theory and critical gerontology. ARIE is based on a four-step approach, which aligns with different stages of public health interventions. It will help ensure that structural discrimination influencing access to healthcare resources during a biological event is not ignored, and that public health authorities work actively toward identifying and addressing ageist and racist biases in their response plans and interventions.</p>","PeriodicalId":50962,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Bioethics","volume":" ","pages":"95-110"},"PeriodicalIF":17.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142856268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Julia F Taylor, Craig Konnoth, Mary Faith Marshall
{"title":"Courageous Providers, Principled Institutions, and Threats to Gender-Affirming Care.","authors":"Julia F Taylor, Craig Konnoth, Mary Faith Marshall","doi":"10.1080/15265161.2025.2504275","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2025.2504275","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":50962,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Bioethics","volume":"25 6","pages":"1-4"},"PeriodicalIF":17.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144235868","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Grayson R Jackson, Jacob D Moses, Lisa Campo-Engelstein
{"title":"Just Knowledge and Treatment: Formal and Epistemic Injustice in Pediatric Gender-Affirming Care.","authors":"Grayson R Jackson, Jacob D Moses, Lisa Campo-Engelstein","doi":"10.1080/15265161.2025.2497988","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2025.2497988","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":50962,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Bioethics","volume":"25 6","pages":"76-78"},"PeriodicalIF":17.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144235877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Scientists' and Policy Professionals' Views on the Translational Pipeline of Human Gene Editing.","authors":"R Jean Cadigan, Margaret Waltz","doi":"10.1080/15265161.2025.2497979","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2025.2497979","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":50962,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Bioethics","volume":"25 6","pages":"28-30"},"PeriodicalIF":17.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144235882","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Elizabeth R Boskey, Jessica D Kant, Ariel K Berman
{"title":"The Role of Reactionary Bioessentialism in Conservative Opposition to Gender-Affirming Care.","authors":"Elizabeth R Boskey, Jessica D Kant, Ariel K Berman","doi":"10.1080/15265161.2025.2497993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2025.2497993","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":50962,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Bioethics","volume":"25 6","pages":"90-92"},"PeriodicalIF":17.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144235885","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"«Doctors must live»: a care ethics inquiry into physicians' late modern suffering.","authors":"Caroline Engen","doi":"10.1007/s11019-025-10258-7","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s11019-025-10258-7","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In 2023, thousands of young Norwegian physicians joined an online movement called #legermåleve (#doctorsmustlive) and shared stories of their own mental and somatic health issues, which they considered to be caused by unacceptable working conditions. This paper discusses this case as an extreme example of physicians' and healthcare workers' suffering in late modern societies, using Vosman and Niemeijer's approach of rethinking care imaginaries by a structured process of thinking along, counter-thinking and rethinking, bringing to bear suffering as a heuristic device. Thinking along, taking the physicians' stories and arguments literally, reveals an image of an unbearable workload. Counter-thinking resituates their suffering within the broader conditions of late modernity, suggesting that the root cause may lie not in the quantity of the workload itself but in its qualities and in its perceived threat to their integrity as caregivers through epistemic and moral injury and an inability to respond to this threat. In rethinking, the ambiguity of suffering- its dual potential as both a constraint and an opening- becomes central. Following the physicians' own interpretations and the solutions emerging from this framing, both their suffering and that of their patients could paradoxically be exacerbated by further decentering physicians and reinforcing utilitarian, data-driven approaches. However, staying with their suffering and reinterpreting its causes opens possibilities to leverage critiques of medicalization at large and of their own suffering in particular, challenging the assumption that the weight of care must always grow heavier. From this reframing, I argue, it is possible to reclaim and reimagine care and the clinical space as a nexus of epistemic and moral privilege, recentering response-ability both relationally and socially.</p>","PeriodicalId":47449,"journal":{"name":"Medicine Health Care and Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":"275-290"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12103476/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143190912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The disservice of publishing preliminary results based on a premature hypothesis - Semmelweis' ordeal revisited.","authors":"Niels Lynøe, Niklas Juth, Anders Eriksson","doi":"10.1007/s11019-025-10257-8","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s11019-025-10257-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In an interesting article, Dr Zuzana Parusniková claimed: (i) that Semmelweis' colleagues did not recognise the importance of his animal experiments, (ii) that the resistance to Semmelweis' hypothesis and results was due mainly to applying mono-causality and (iii) Semmelweis inability to communicate, (iv) that the New Vienna Medical School applied evidence-based medicine, and (v) that the philosophy of Karl Popper is the best interpretation of Semmelweis' scientific approach. Here, we present some factual aspects of Semmelweis' text from 1861 and discuss Dr Parusniková's claims against this backdrop. We conclude that Semmelweis might intentionally have abstained from communicating his hypothesis and results between 1847 and 1849 - including the results from his animal experiments - as he thought that they would eventually be understood and accepted. Semmelweis' hypothesis was that cadaveric matters and decaying particles were the cause of childbed fever and increased maternal mortality. This hypothesis might have been controversial, but we claim that the major reason for the resistance was eminence-based and induced by the publication of preliminary and suboptimal results, based on a premature version of his hypothesis. If the New Vienna Medical School had been influenced by evidence-based medicine, we believe that Semmelweis' empirical results would have been accepted - as they were based on an almost randomised controlled trial - and if the results had not been associated with his hypothesis but instead had focused on a black box procedure. We agree that the philosophy of Popper might be appropriate when analysing Semmelweis' scientific approach when abandoning low-level theories. However, to understand the resistance against Semmelweis' hypothesis and results, it is not sufficient to refer to a Pickwickian discussion; a Kuhnian framework is more adequate.</p>","PeriodicalId":47449,"journal":{"name":"Medicine Health Care and Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":"261-273"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12103370/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143410763","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On value compatibility: reflections on the ethical framework for pandemic healthcare distribution.","authors":"Yijie Wang","doi":"10.1007/s11019-025-10261-y","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s11019-025-10261-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>An ethical framework for pandemic healthcare distribution typically encompasses multiple ethical values. However, integrating various ethical values and distributive principles into a single framework raises concerns about their compatibility and the overall coherence of the framework. This issue of value compatibility could lead to moral inconsistencies within the ethical framework, leading to practical indetermination when facing conflicting implications. This paper offers a methodological resolution to the compatibility problem, serving as an effective tool to mitigate the impact of value conflicts where possible. It proposes four pathways: specifying values rather than balancing them, incorporating values rather than weighing them, reinforcing values rather than aggregating them, and seeking scientific evidence. By developing coherent ethical frameworks where values do not contradict each other, this approach also enhances practical ethical decision-making. Using the COVID-19 vaccine distribution as a case study, this approach demonstrates how conflicting values can yield practical prioritization strategies, such as allocating vaccines to healthcare and essential workers, addressing multiple layers of disadvantage, and assessing age-related prioritization. Reflecting on the compatibility of values within ethical frameworks offers crucial insights beyond COVID-19, contributing to the development of robust ethical frameworks for future public health crises.</p>","PeriodicalId":47449,"journal":{"name":"Medicine Health Care and Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":"303-313"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12103310/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143574232","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}