Humanising Science and Medicine

Humanising Science and Medicine: Critical Paradigmatic Conversations

Humanising Science and Medicine: Critical Paradigmatic Conversations is a compilation of interview-dialogues with eminent philosophers, scientists, medical practitioners, psychologists and independent researchers that seeks to interrogate the deep nature of the prevailing scientific and medical-scientific paradigm, and where it might be problematic and wanting, and even ripe for paradigmatic change.

In the mid-1970s, philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend was speaking at length about the incipient authoritarian tendencies in ‘the new religion’ of mainstream science; and around the same time the highly influential radical humanist Ivan Illich published his seminal challenge to modern medicine, Limits to Medicine – Medical Nemisis: The Expropriation of Health.

Half a century on, this new book is very much in the tradition of Feyerabend and Illich – and indeed, in the spirit of Thomas Kuhn’s iconic 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (which book inspired the use of the term ‘paradigmatic’ in the book’s sub-title).

Framed by a substantial Introduction reviewing the critical literature in the field, and a Conclusion that considers the possibility of a much-needed revolution in our cultural understandings of science, and of disease and illness and their treatment, the core of the book consists of twelve in-depth interviews with philosophers, psychologists, medical doctors and cultural theorists and researchers – all of which interrogate the phenomenon of science per se and/or of modern medical bioscience, in their manifold aspects – including why medical science today is arguably fundamentally flawed from philosophical, medical and cultural-political viewpoints. Taken together, these deep conversations paint a picture that shows what might be wrong with modern science, and how it needs to change. Interviewees include Professors Barrie Condon, Brian Martin and David Morris, Drs Katherine Buchanan, Martin Cohen, Thomas Hardtmuth and Ian James Kidd, and psychologists Dr Bruce Scott and Sami Timimi.

Humanising Science and Medicine will be essential reading for all open-minded scientists and medical practitioners – and for all people with concerns about the directions that modern science and medicine are taking, and who more specifically are open to considering how we can create a genuinely humanistic system for supporting human health and illness that is properly grounded in true science, and which brings a holistic perspective to well-being in our increasingly narrow technocratic age.

Contents

• Foreword – Dr Tess Lawrie
• Introduction – Richard House, Ph.D.
• Dr Martin Cohen: Paradigms, paradigms…
• Barrie Condon: Science for heretics
• Professor Brian Martin: Dissent in medicine
• Professor David B. Morris: Postmodern illness?
• Assoc. Professor Ian Kidd, with Onel Brooks: ‘We’re all Feyerabendians now’: where science and society meet
• Dawn Lester & David Parker: The Western medical system is not based in genuine science
• Vincent Di Stefano: On the humanisation of medicine
• Dr Bruce Scott: The limitations of ‘medico-scientific’ psychology, mental healthism and ‘cure’
• Dr Sami Timimi: Towards a more ‘humanistic’ psychiatry?
• Dr Thomas Hardtmuth: Towards a ‘scientific revolution’ in modern medicine
• Peter Taylor: The science of climate, Covid and conspiracy
• Dr Katherine Buchanan: Science in a different key: the case of Goethean Science
• Conclusion – R. House, Ph.D.: A Working Manifesto for Humanising Science and Medicine
• Afterword – Professor Gloria Moss
• Postscript – Dr Andrew Wakefield
• Further reading
• Index

About the Author

Richard House Ph.D. is a former BPS chartered psychologist, a former psychotherapist and senior university lecturer in psychology, psychotherapy and education studies (early childhood). He has had a deep interest in the philosophy of science and the phenomena of well-being, illness and healing since the 1970s. This is his fifteenth book.