Therapy-speak is the imprecise and superficial integration of psychotherapy language into everyday communication, especially by privileged or wealthy people. Despite the advantages of normalizing psychotherapy language, such as resisting epistemic injustice and enhancing awareness of mental health issues, therapy-speak raises important concerns. On the epistemic front, therapy-speak is susceptible to the erosion of the meaning and relevance of psychotherapy terms, pathologizing, and the risk of self-diagnosis. Regarding its ethical concerns, therapy-speak might be used to discredit individuals, evade responsibilities, and even signal social status, by taking an objective stance. Beyond these epistemic and ethical concerns, therapy-speak can also be weaponized to promote and perpetuate some forms of epistemic injustice, and to generate affective injustice. In particular, we argue that the weaponization of therapy-speak exploits the epistemic authority and the credibility excesses of medical evidence, the conflation between the descriptive and the normative, and the linguistic strategy of deniability to impose a specific way to manage emotions in challenging, and unjust, situations.

This paper critically evaluates Alex Broadbent's Inquiry Thesis, which defines medicine by the core competencies of prediction and understanding. While the thesis seeks to avoid parochialism by identifying features that could apply across traditions, its applicability falters when examined against African traditional medicine (ATM). Using ATM as a test case, this paper demonstrates that legitimate medical systems can operate coherently and enjoy broad social legitimacy without consistently exercising prediction or understanding in Broadbent's sense. This challenges the Inquiry Thesis both as a general account of medicine and as an inclusive framework. Accordingly, this paper tentatively advances a Refined Curative Thesis (RCT), which shifts the unifying criterion from competencies to aims: medicine is defined as the organized, socially recognized effort to restore or maintain health through interventions directed at beneficial change. RCT accommodates epistemic diversity, preserves conceptual discipline, and avoids collapsing into unstructured pluralism. By centring the curative aim, this revised account offers a more inclusive, philosophically robust, and culturally sensitive definition of medicine. The analysis deepens philosophical understanding of medicine while also bearing practical significance for global health policy, intercultural dialogue, and the recognition of diverse medical systems.

The word 'dignity' has been applied in the context of everything from hospital gowns to the image of God. Despite calls to jettison the concept from moral philosophy, the term persists, and definitional schema abound. This essay argues that 'dignity' is a placeholder for fundamental values, a 'buck-passing' move that signals the strength of feeling behind the argument. Like a 'burning' or 'stabbing' pain without fire or blades, claims of dignity violation help to diagnose the kind of moral harm that elicits the feeling of indignation. In this sense, 'dignity' is a move in a language game that challenges the epistemic constraints around who matters. To demonstrate how 'dignity' operates as a move in a language-game rooted in embodiment, I conclude with a consideration of how deceased bodies are treated in medical education and the Honor Walk. If understood as a call to evaluate who counts as 'people-like-us' and how they should be treated, dignity remains a valuable concept in bioethics despite its ambiguity.

A common conflation happens both in everyday discussions in medicine as well as in the medical literature-namely, equating 'parents of minors' with 'surrogate decision makers.' It is important for pediatric clinicians and ethicists to stop using language that confuses and obscures the important difference between surrogates and parents in ways that affect the ethics of decision-making for minors. Specifically, parents of minor children are morally different than surrogates, and by using surrogate language, a misunderstanding arises that distorts the moral space and relevant obligations that pediatric providers, parents of minors, and even pediatric patients find themselves in when making medical decisions.

This article examines the cases of Jahi McMath and Poe's M. Valdemar to reconceptualize the idea of undeath from a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective. It builds upon the ambiguity existing in defining a body in the state of 'brain death' after permanent loss of consciousness to analyze how the brain, as Deleuze and Guattari's 'partial object,' facilitates the construction of the mind as a transcendent entity. Evaluated by the presence/lack of consciousness, this transcendent entity becomes the factor defining the health of a body on life-support. In combining aspects of medical science with theoretical abstraction, this article aims to change the negative conception of an 'undead body' as an abjection that disrupts the boundary between the binaries of life and death. Instead, it will re-evaluate such bodies as 'undead assemblages' that exist in liminal spaces of constant flux and possess the potential to be affected by the environment that sustains them. We will further explore how the minor identities of such bodies affect their treatment within the medical community and set off the process of becoming-minor and becoming-patient, as Jahi and Valdemar's marginalized bodies transform into Deleuzian events that challenge the boundaries of life, death, and identity within medical and cultural systems.

Orthorexia nervosa is defined as an exaggerated and obsessive fixation on healthy eating. In recent years, there has been growing debate over whether orthorexia nervosa should be considered a new psychiatric disorder. This paper discusses the conceptual issues that emerge from the attempt to identify the diagnostic criteria for orthorexia nervosa as opposed to non-pathological cases of healthy eating or 'healthy orthorexia'. The analysis focuses on two main strategies that have been proposed in the literature: using physical impairment (malnutrition) and having recourse to the presence of psychological and psychosocial distress. The first strategy requires fundamental changes in the conceptualization of orthorexia nervosa, while the second risks unacceptably pathologizing uncommon lifestyles devoted to pursuing one specific activity, interest, or plan. Thus, substantial problems undermine the possibility of considering orthorexia nervosa, as it currently stands, as a plausible nosographic category. By proposing an analogy with eco-anxiety, the paper lastly shows that, if one accepts the widespread conceptualization of orthorexia nervosa, this behavior is better interpreted as an adaptive response than as a form of mental disorder.

Racial classifications have a complex and troubled past in the social and scientific history of humankind. They are the result of racism and have been used to devalue and degrade non-White people. Although the concept of race has acquired a social component and the genetic similarity of people based on race has been proven, the category is increasingly used in pharmacogenetic studies to create biased study populations under the guise of personalized medicine. The heart failure drug BiDil, which was only approved for Black people in 2005, gained particular notoriety. Its race-specific approval reignited the debate about the assumption that there are genetic differences between people of different races and led to a further biopolitical instrumentalization of the term 'race'. Despite the expiry of the race-specific patent, race-specific labeling continues to take place in research. In this paper, these racializations of pharmacogenetics are examined, explaining how they arise and how they are kept alive. Finally, this paper argues for better moderation of race in pharmacogenetic studies.

This paper critically analyzes the meaning of uncertainty tolerance (UT), a phenomenon of growing interest in healthcare. Medical practitioners, educators, and researchers have increasingly acknowledged the importance of UT for both clinicians and patients, and called for greater attention to improving it. However, we argue that the prevailing conception of UT is an inadequate normative ideal, due to its narrow understanding of uncertainty as exclusively an aversive state entailing negative outcomes, and of tolerance as merely the endurance of these outcomes. We show how this endurance-based, outcomes-focused conception of UT is both theoretically incoherent and practically unhelpful. We make the case for an alternative conception based not on endurance but adaptation, and focused not on outcomes but moral virtues, which we view as instrumental capacities that enable adaptation. We develop a provisional integrative taxonomy of these key virtues, discuss both the promises and challenges of this new adaptation-based, virtue-focused conception of UT, and identify fruitful directions for future work.

In response to the increasingly acknowledged physical, emotional, and psychological challenges of medical education, 'wellness' initiatives have been widely instituted. While the idea of 'wellness' represents a well-intentioned effort to mitigate these stressors, we argue that this notion lacks the moral and philosophical grounding to allow students and trainees to thrive and, on its own, cannot serve as a sufficient goal for medical education reform efforts. We propose the neo-Aristotelian concept of 'flourishing' as a better overarching goal for undergraduate and graduate medical education to pursue in their efforts to better equip their students amidst the challenges of medical school and residency training.

Buford first criticizes my 2019 paper by relying upon a view about the permanence of death that no one should hold as it makes death due to extrinsic features. The second criticism involves a description of cerebrum transplants that I don't accept. The continued existence of a transplanted cerebrum doesn't show that the whole brain death criterion hasn't been met as the brainstem-less person has gone out of existence and so no longer has a brain and thus trivially meets the whole brain criterion. Buford's third criticism is that a criterion should be helpful, doctors can make use of it, and legislators can enshrine it in law. I admit that criterion for the death of the person won't be useful when the person dies but animal remains. But the criterion of existence for the person will be met and one can infer from that the death criterion has been met.

When a patient lacks capacity, medical decisions on their behalf are made according to an advance directive or by surrogate decision making. Often, however, patients' previously expressed wishes are ambiguous, vague, inconsistent, or fail to anticipate the patient's current condition. In this paper, we argue that when patient's wishes are not clear, surrogates must utilize interpretative principles to reach a decision regarding treatment. We identify three such principles: the value-substitution, value-coherence, and volitional principles. We argue that the volitional principle is the most reliable way of capturing what the patient would have wanted when they no longer possess decisional capacity. This approach tasks the surrogate with identifying a medical choice close to what the patient would have agreed to based on previously expressed wishes without attributing the surrogate's own values to the patient or attempting to provide an interpretation consistent with the patient's other values. This approach is best positioned to support patients' sovereignty for those who were previously able to express wishes for or against life-sustaining treatment.

The ethics of anti-love drugs - pharmaceutical interventions to dampen one's feelings of love for, say, a former partner - have been the subject of a growing body of research. Scientific research on these drugs is fairly nascent and ethical debates about their implications are therefore by necessity largely speculative. Nonetheless, insofar as future developments in anti-love drugs propose to affect a value as personal and important as love, these ethical debates are imperative. In this article, I propose to add a new dimension to ethical discourse on anti-love drugs by contextualising it within existing ethical debates on precommitment. An agent who consumes an anti-love drug does so to limit their future behavior - i.e. preventing themselves from reigniting their former relationship-based on their present preferences. The use of anti-love drugs is therefore an unambiguous example of a precommitment strategy. This recognition therefore allows one to draw on existing ethical research on precommitment to invigorate ethical discourse on anti-love drugs.

The Exception from Informed Consent (EFIC) permits patient enrolment into therapeutic emergency research where obtaining informed consent is challenging. Yet this fails to resolve a core ethical conflict in the research and has generated controversy. This is because existing justification and practice has relied on applying EFIC per study-a wholesale permission to enroll irrespective of circumstance-instead of per patient. Our novel justification for enrolment centers on applying EFIC per patient, which empowers the enrolling clinician to judge whether to enroll patients with an Exception. This contrasts with the idea that clinician judgment is surplus to the judgements already made by institutions in deciding the research may proceed. Instead, we show that enrolling clinician's judgment is ethically significant and should not be overlooked: attending to this strengthens the research ethically and reduces controversy. There should be a bigger role for the clinician in the research enrolment space.

Narrative medicine has emerged over the past few decades as an exciting approach to medical practice, interweaving the practice of medicine with the practices of literary analysis and reflective writing. It is often claimed that narrative medicine enables practitioners to understand and empathize with patient stories, effectively 'joining' patients in illness. However, I argue that there are reasons to be suspicious of narrative medicine's ability to promote patient-centered care. I begin by questioning the distinctiveness of narrative knowledge, suggesting that it is neither able to be propositional knowledge ('knowledge-that') nor phenomenal/experiential knowledge ('knowledge-what-it's-like'). Then, I consider an alternative reading of narrative medicine, by which narratives are simply ways to structure patient information so that a physician can more readily empathize with the patient. I dismiss this alternative as unsatisfactory given that it depends on either all patients building narratives or physicians imposing narrative structure(s) where one does not inherently exist, thus overriding patients. Finally, I provide possible supplements and alternatives to narrative medicine, proposing that active listening and the removal of systemic barriers to physicians' abilities to provide humanistic care (e.g., lower administrative, profit, and documentation burdens) may be a first step to putting empathetic patient care on the forefront. Ultimately, I think that these efforts (while their fruition may present difficulty), rather than sifting through patient information to construct and elevate narratives, present the opportunity to accurately refocus patient-centered care.