Good medicine is more than a set of technical decisions and interventions involving drugs, operations or tests. It demands more of the practitioner – professionalism, empathetic care, moral consideration, insight, an understanding of human suffering and necessarily, wisdom. These attributes are not always prioritised in selecting for or training healthcare professionals, and there is little time or attention given to their authentic development within busy working environments. Further, there is a widening hiatus of trust, understanding and expectation between medicine and society around what constitutes good medicine. This pressingly requires real engagement around medicine’s role and society’s values. A purely scientific answer will never prove sufficient here.
Medicine Unboxed is a unique project and conference programme that engages both the public and front-line NHS staff with a view of medicine that is infused and elaborated by the humanities. Contributors include artists, writers, the clergy, poets, philosophers, lawyers, linguists, musicians, theatre, ethicists, academics and doctors. The results are thought-provoking, inspiring, sometimes funny and often
moving.
Our theme this year is Medicine and Values.
We think of medicine as simply fact-based, efficient and scientifically robust. These arbiters can become the measures of good medicine. However, medicine is infused with judgments of value – individually for doctors and patients but also in medical science, for society, for policy-makers and health economists. Ethics, law and religion inform duties and rights in medicine, through principles and values. The values that define good medicine are not always apparent or agreed upon and there remains the potential for tension between them.
We’d like to invite you to come along to Medicine Unboxed 2011 and join us in uncovering the values that pertain to medical care and debating the ambivalences around the arbiters of good medicine. Our speakers this year include the Rev. John Bell, John Carey, Lionel Shriver, Jo Shapcott, Ray Tallis, Paul Bailey, Michael
Arditti and Havi Carel.
Come to the debate – be inspired.
Sam Guglani, Consultant Clinical Oncologist.