The Wayback Machine

Abstract

We suffer from a radical autonomy which too often collapses the therapeutic alliance between patient and physician into a health-care transaction between consumer and provider, a fee-for-service exchange for something far short of true health. Some ethicists and physicians are seeking a better way, by employing a virtue ethics approach in which health is seen as a distinct good and the proper end of a medical encounter. Curlin and Tollefsen's The Way of Medicine (2021) synthesizes this material into a heuristic contrasting what they characterize as the Provider Services Model and the Way of Medicine. The authors believe physicians must choose between the two models and serve, respectively, either the well-being or the health of the people they meet as patients. Between the authors' dichotomous choices, many physicians will find a middle way in virtue ethics approaches, which instead characterize health as a communal foundation to human flourishing and autonomy as serving communal as well as individual goods.