Plato and holistic medicine

Popular visions of holistic health and holistic medicine are not so much reactions to perceived excesses of technological medicine as they are visions of the good life itself and how to attain it. This paper attempts to clarify some of the concepts associated with holistic health and medicine. The particular vision of holistic health presented here is well exemplified in the writings of Plato. First, I examine the scientific concept of holism and argue that, while medicine is inadequately characterized by scientific reductionism, any plausible holistic medicine must make room for a limited scientific reductionism. Next, I analyze the complexity of Plato's usage of “health” and demonstrate some of the parallels between Plato's thought and popular and scientific visions of holistic health. Finally, I look at what Plato has to say about medical practice and the relation of medicine and philosophy as therapies for the whole person. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Socratic Method: analyzing ethical issues in health administration.

The Socratic Method has long been recognized by the legal profession as an effective tool for promoting critical thinking and analysis in the law. This article describes ways the technique can be used in health administration education to help future administrators develop the "ethical rudder" they will need for effective leadership. An illustrative dialogue is provided.     

Executive dialogue: The excellent manager

In an H&HN roundtable, health care human resources executives and consultants examine characteristics of excellent managers and how to identify them in the hiring process.     

The Socratic method in teaching medical ethics: Potentials and limitations

The Socratic method has a long history in teaching philosophy and mathematics, marked by such names as Karl Weierstrass, Leonard Nelson and Gustav Heckmann. Its basic idea is to encourage the participants of a learning group (of pupils, students, or practitioners) to work on a conceptual, ethical or psychological problem by their own collective intellectual effort, without a textual basis and without substantial help from the teacher whose part it is mainly to enforce the rigid procedural rules designed to ensure a fruitful, diversified, open and consensus-oriented thought process. Several features of the Socratic procedure, especially in the canonical form given to it by Heckmann, are highly attractive for the teaching of medical ethics in small groups: the strategy of starting from relevant singular individual experiences, interpreting and cautiously generalizing them in a process of inter-subjective confrontation and confirmation, the duty of non-directivity on the part of the teacher in regard to the contents of the discussion, the necessity, on the part of the participants, to make explicit both their own thinking and the way they understand the thought of others, the strict separation of content level and meta level discussion and, not least, the wise use made of the emotional and motivational resources developing in the group process. Experience shows, however, that the canonical form of the Socratic group suffers from a number of drawbacks which may be overcome by loosening the rigidity of some of the rules. These concern mainly the injunction against substantial interventions on the part of the teacher and the insistence on consensus formation rooted in Leonard Nelson's Neo-Kantian Apriorism.     

Baby massage: a dialogue of touch

The significance and benefits of touch and massage for preterm infants in Neonatal Intensive Care Units and in the community are discussed. The article emphasises the value of massage in helping parents to bond with their baby and as part of family-centred care. A bibliography is included.     

Nurse-teacher: a dialogue with pedagogical education

College faculty presents itself as an important subject matter in a moment of transformation on nursing education characterized by syllabus and methodological changes. This assignment aimed to reflect upon the pedagogical education of the nurse-teacher in order to make this education appropriate to assist the new educational demands of society which are considered by the Syllabus Guidelines of Nursing Graduation. It is about a bibliographical study. The literature review permits to state that pedagogical education is necessary for the nurse-teacher to educate a nurse capable of acting in all care dimensions as a promoter for the health of the citizen, the family and the community. In this context, the reflecting practice is pointed out as guideline to the development of faculty education.