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Life, Pain, Suffering and Death: Medicine as Concealment of the Truth

Publication |
2008

Abstract

Interpretation of Jan Patočka´s conception of human life as a threefold movement in the context of medicine. Medicalization of human life from birth to death, commodification of health and psychiatrization of social problems represents specific cultural practice of dealing with suffering and death.

Patočka offers alternative perspective: acknowledgement and acceptance of suffering and death that represent fundamental human experience open the possibility of „life in the truth“, and of transcendence, and might lead to transformation of human relationships within medicine – i.e., ethics.