The primary objective of the study was to analyse the correlations between belief in and acceptance of vaccine-related conspiracy theories and prevailing cultural models. The authors emphasise that not only right-wing populism and fundamentalist beliefs, but also postmodern relativism, may contribute to the rejection of established medical knowledge and practices. Drawing on a survey conducted among a representative sample of 1000 members of the Polish population using random-quota sampling, the authors offer an analysis at the level of preferred models of knowledge and the epistemological conditions that contribute to the rejection of contemporary medical knowledge on vaccination in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. The article is inspired by the theoretical concepts of Ernest Gellner. This cultural and epistemological analysis of knowledge models that support the rise of vaccine hesitancy across different societies may contribute to a better understanding of the anti-vaccination movement and cultural trends that fuel belief in conspiracy theories and medical populism. The authors argue that the principles of Enlightenment rationalism – grounded in knowledge verified through transparent and testable procedures – provide essential cognitive support in countering vaccine-related myths, rumours, and conspiracy theories.
As the use of digital information technologies has grown and transformed health care practices and ecologies, concerns have been raised about the implications for health care relationships. But it is no simple matter to pin down what makes health care relationships good and valuable, nor to assess whether and how digitalisation changes this. ‘Relationship goods’ such as care, compassion and respect are conceptually and practically complex. Longstanding models based on assumptions of dyadic relationships between individual health care practitioners and patients are no longer fully fit for purpose. This paper makes a case for re-thinking health care relationships to reflect the ongoing shift to digital health care ecologies. It outlines some of the key questions and considerations that will need to be addressed to support more rigorous evaluations of the implications of digital technologies and to better guide future design and health care improvement work. It illustrates some of the resources that exist within contemporary philosophy and ethics to support this agenda and calls for collaborative interdisciplinary working to investigate and help preserve the value of health care relationships through ongoing change.
Rapid advances in AI for medical applications are accompanied by an increasing demand for vast datasets. Privacy constraints - legal restrictions such as GDPR, as well as more general ethical concerns - pose significant barriers to the acquisition and use of data. Synthetic medical data (SMD) is AI-generated data that mimics real patient information. SMD is being promoted as an ethical solution that preserves privacy while enabling scalable model training. However, as we will show, the use of SMD raises its own set of issues. SMD's emphasis on privacy and scalability subtly embeds ethical and epistemic trade-offs that undermine the principles commonly regarded as being paramount in medical ethics. These trade-offs lack the kind of ethical justification one would expect in decisions that disrupt commonly accepted values and priorities, such as those captured by Beauchamp and Childress' four principles. In the discourse on the ethical advantages of SMD, privacy tends to be treated as a value in its own right. We show that this is a problematic assumption. Transparency, privacy, scalability, and fidelity are all linked in complex ways with the principles of medical ethics. We map these relationships and show that when privacy is privileged over other values, it conflicts with autonomy and beneficence. Our aim here is not to establish that this privileging is wrong per se, but to show that it needs careful analysis before we can accept the idea that SMD is indeed ethically advantageous.
Is “existential disease” a meaningful concept? This study scrutinizes six arguments in support of the concept. First, putative existential diseases are already discussed in the academic literature, including existential neurosis and existential OCD. Second, existential disease may be understood as occurring in the absence of “existential health,” a notion that has received increasing scholarly attention. Third, the very practices of diagnosing “existential suffering” and providing “existential therapy” appear to entail a concept of existential disease. Fourth, in the same way as physical and mental suffering corresponds to physical and mental disease, existential suffering corresponds to existential disease. Fifth, existential suffering arguably falls under several traditional definitions of disease, thereby supporting the legitimacy of the concept of existential disease. Sixth, medical interventions such as palliative sedation and assisted dying in response to existential suffering—interventions typically reserved for disease—seem to presuppose an existential form of disease. Although most of these arguments face important objections, certain conceptions of disease do warrant the category of existential disease. Nonetheless, there is a substantial risk of medicalizing existential concerns, and it is not clear that framing existential suffering as disease is the best way to respond to those who suffer existentially, especially given that health professionals may not be well equipped to address such forms of distress. Hence, more and better arguments are needed to ascertain the concept of existential disease.
