[Philosophy of medicine in 2000]

In 2000 there is a prevalence of iatrosophistry above iatrophilosophy and philosophy of medicine. The reason of medicine as the religious duty of charity or secular philanthropy has been undergoing a crisis. Various forms of situation ethics has been replacing mortality. Medicine has been increasingly occupied by the neocapitalistic law of value. Illness now has an auction value. Suffering is a kind of debt, liable to insurance, to re-buy or to sell. The patient is utmost interest to pharmaceutical concerns and health factories. Health, formerly nationalized and now becomes privatized. The government, the state, feel released from the social contract, and throws the responsibility upon the private person and the insufficient charity of the poor community. The man is treated as a biological engine, equipped with a psychical computer super structure. The spirit is pushed to the background. An increase of paramedical and often really magic procedures, such as was never before, can be observed. Medicine now, is a team-work. The doctor and the pharmacist has lost his paternal and feudal position. The split between the clinical sciences and the basic research sciences is nearly complete. The flood of medical publications becomes more and more intensive. We note a paradigm changing from "remedy" to "treatment", and from "symptom" to "problem". Medical practice differs when addressed to the rich or the poor, the curable, the incurable and superfluous one. There are signs of a recurrence to anthropopolitic and eugenic methods, or various forms of euthanasia. Medicine is only pushing away suffering and death. In this sense everyone is virtually incurable. Who is alive has the right to live. Mortality exists independently of different people's outlook, but is hardly accepted by scientists. Morality is of categorical value, totally different from ethics and inaccessible by scientific methods. Hence difficulties.