A new path for humanistic medicine

Résumé En

According to some recent approaches in the philosophy of medicine, biomedicine should be replaced or completed by a humanistic medical model. Two humanistic approaches, narrative medicine and the phenomenology of medicine, have notably grown popular in the last decades. This paper first suggests that these humanistic criticisms of biomedicine are insufficient. A central problem is that both approaches seem to give a straw man definition of biomedicine. Second, I argue that the subsequent definition of humanism found in their approaches is problematically reduced to a compassionate or psychological approach. My main claim is that humanism cannot only be looked for in the patient-physician relationship and that a broad definition of medicine should help revisit humanism. With this end in view, I defend what I call an outcomes-oriented approach to humanistic medicine, where humanism is set upon the capacity for a health system to produce good health outcomes.