Humanizing medical practices. The ethical and cultural mission of palliative care

Abstract

This article aims to reread and rethink everyday medical practices in light of a borderline context: the palliative care. The starting point is an analysis of some of the crucial concepts of the pallium philosophy: attention to the phenomenology of the experiences of illness, the centrality of the patient in the care relationship, the concept of total pain as a synthesis of pain and suffering, and the theme of temporality in the therapeutic pathway and in the dynamics of accompaniment. The attempt is to show how these values, certainly valid in a context of exceptionality and incurability such as that of palliative care, also have a universal value and, as such, can act as a moral compass to guide medical action and restore its artistic and holistic face. It is a matter of unraveling certain ethical questions in order to rediscover the meaning of medical practices of care, which must not be limited to being technically efficient and in step with techno-scientific progress, but need the guidance of that humanitarian ethos that slows down the erosive processes of personality – triggered by an increasingly hyper-specialized but humanly poor technical medicine – in which the protagonists of the care relationship are involved: the doctor and the patient.