Dehumanization in Modern Medicine and Science

Abstract

Modern medicine and science share propensities to objectify and dehumanize the person. The concept of the person has been a neglected area of scholarship in medicine. This neglect is related to emphasis on third-person perspective methodologies that dominate the social sciences and medicine. A more adequate comprehension of personhood requires holistic and non-reductive approaches to science that integrate first-person and second-person perspectives of the person along with third-person perspectives. Resistance to a paradigm shift in science, which would integrate qualitative and quantitative methodologies, can be understood as defensive attempts to maintain the existential dogmatism wedded to scientism and technization as the dominant discourse of medicine, psychiatry, and psychology. This defensiveness can, itself, be understood as a worldview defense that provides protection against anxiety linked to mortality concerns.