Dehumanization of medical education. Part 1. What is the cause?

The article explores the dangerous trend of medical dehumanization. There is a growing tendency to view the patient as a purely biological organism, neglecting their spiritual dimension. Understanding the prevailing situation largely revolves around social assessments, while a fundamental reason lies in the realm of worldview, subsequently «sprouting» into social relationships – the dehumanization of medical education. A significant factor in the decline of the status of humanitarian knowledge in the modern medical education environment is the clash between two scientific methodological paradigms: reductionism and holism. Modern biology and medicine are saturated with reductionist ideas, which are absorbed from the very first courses in medicalschool. As a result, the ideal physician, armed with the philosophy of reductionism, is a biotechnologist, where the human is viewed as a biomechanical machine, illness as its malfunction, and treatment as repair. A reductionist doctor doesn't see the sick person; for them, all patients are merely complex physicochemical systems. The world of reductionism is devoid of life, lacking values, meanings, and purposes; it is merely a matter of nerve irritations and reflexes.

Professional medical knowledge is influenced by a rigid reductionism that reduces the «living» to the «non-living» at the level of atoms and molecules, whereas humanistic knowledge is permeated by ideas of holism and the irreducibility of human essence to physic-chemical reality. The foundation of humanitarian knowledge is a holistic worldview, where life and the human being are understood as primary and autonomous entities in existence. At the same time, the main thing is the phenomenon of values, which are understood as primary foundations, «humanitarian atoms» incapable of being reduced to anything else. The conflict between two worldviews is projected into the schism of core medical subjects and humanities, which serves as the methodological basis for the dehumanization of medical education. In the training of a physician, it is necessary to reconcile the types of rationality found in natural science and humanities knowledge.

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