Medicine, health care, and philosophy
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Much discussion of decision-making processes in medicine has been patient-centred. It has been assumed that there is, most often, one patient. ⋯ What conditions need to be met if decision-making can be said to be shared? What is a shared decision-making process and what is a shared autonomous decision-making process? Why make the distinction? Examples are drawn from the area of new reproductive medicine and clinical genetics. Possible gender-differences in shared decision-making are discussed.
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Reasoning and judgement in health care entail complex responses to problems whose demands typically derive from several areas of specialism at once. We argue that current evidence- or value-based models of health care reasoning, despite their virtues, are insufficient to account for responses to such problems exhaustively. At the same time, we offer reasons for contending that health professionals in fact engage in forms of reasoning of a kind described for millennia under the concept of wisdom. ⋯ We argue for the relevance of a threefold model of reasoning to modern health care situations in which multifaceted teamwork and complex settings demand wise judgement. A model based on practical wisdom highlights a triadic process with features activating capacities of the self (professional), other (patient and/or carers and/or colleagues) and aspects of the problem itself. Such a framework could be used to develop current approaches to health care based on case review and experiential learning.