Truth-telling to the patient, family, and the sexual partner: a rights approach to the role of healthcare providers in adult HIV disclosure in China.

Patients' rights are central in today's legislation and social policies related to health care, including HIV care, in not only Western countries but around the world. However, given obvious socio-cultural differences it is often asked how or to what extent patients' rights should be respected in non-Western societies such as China. In this paper, it is argued that the patients' rights framework is compatible with Chinese culture, and that from the perspective of contemporary patient rights healthcare providers have a duty to disclose truthfully the diagnosis and prognosis to their patients, that the Chinese cultural practice of involving families in care should - with consent from the patient - be promoted out of respect for patients' rights and well-being, and that healthcare providers should be prepared to address the issue of disclosing a patient's HIV status to sexual partner(s).

"Personal Knowledge" in Medicine and the Epistemic Shortcomings of Scientism.

In this paper, we outline a framework for understanding the different kinds of knowledge required for medical practice and use this framework to show how scientism undermines aspects of this knowledge. The framework is based on Michael Polanyi's claim that knowledge is primarily the product of the contemplations and convictions of persons and yet at the same time carries a sense of universality because it grasps at reality. Building on Polanyi's ideas, we propose that knowledge can be described along two intersecting "dimensions": the tacit-explicit and the particular-general.

Spinoza, Styron, and the ethics of healing.

In this essay I discuss a passage from William Styron's memoir of his long struggle with chronic severe depression, from the standpoint of a Spinozian understanding of agency and self-worth. In this passage Styron relates how in hearing a piece of music he was abruptly struck by a recollection of "all the joys [his] house had known" and how this brought a realization that it would be wrong for him to kill himself: wrong because it would be an abandonment of those who had shared in those joys and a "desecration" of himself. He tells how this realization led him to admit himself to hospital for treatment and thereby to a slow and difficult recovery.