-
665Perspectives on Evidence-Based Healthcare for WomenJournal of Women's Health 19 (7): 1235-1238. 2010.We live in an age of evidence-based healthcare, where the concept of evidence has been avidly and often uncritically embraced as a symbol of legitimacy, truth, and justice. By letting the evidence dictate healthcare decision making from the bedside to the policy level, the normative claims that inform decision making appear to be negotiated fairly—without subjectivity, prejudice, or bias. Thus, the term ‘‘evidence-based’’ is typically read in the health sciences as the empirically adequate stand…Read more
-
2497Working for the Cure: Challenging Pink Ribbon Activism [Book Chapter]In Roma Harris, Nadine Wathen & Sally Wyatt (eds.), [Book] Configuring Health Consumers: Health Work and the Imperative of Personal Responsibility. Eds. R. Harris, N. Wathen, S. Wyatt. Amsterdam: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, Palgrave-macmillan. 2010.In accordance with the critical women’s health literature recounting the ways that women are encouraged to submit themselves to various sorts of health “imperatives”, I investigate the messages tacitly conveyed to women in “campaigns for the cure” and breast cancer awareness efforts, which, I argue, overemphasizes a “positive attitude”, healthy lifestyle, and cure rather than prevention of this life-threatening disease. I challenge that the message of hope pervading breast cancer discourse silen…Read more
-
1937Iconoclast or Creed? Objectivism, pragmatism, and the hierarchy of evidencePerspectives in Biology and Medicine 52 (2): 168-187. 2009.Because “evidence” is at issue in evidence-based medicine (EBM), the critical responses to the movement have taken up themes from post-positivist philosophy of science to demonstrate the untenability of the objectivist account of evidence. While these post-positivist critiques seem largely correct, I propose that when they focus their analyses on what counts as evidence, the critics miss important and desirable pragmatic features of the evidence-based approach. This article redirects critical at…Read more
-
67Clinical Evidence and the Absent Body in Medical PhenomenologyInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethiics 3 (1): 43-71. 2010.The once animated efforts in medical phenomenology to integrate the art and
science of medicine (or to humanize scientific medicine) have fallen out of philosophical fashion. Yet the current competing medical discourses of evidencebased medicine and patient-centered care suggest that this theoretical endeavor requires renewed attention. In this paper, I attempt to enliven the debate by discussing theoretical weaknesses in the way the “lived body” has operated in the medical phenomenology literatu…Read more -
1397How can Feminist Theories of Evidence Assist Clinical Reasoning and Decision-Making?Social Epistemology (TBA): 1-28. 2013.While most of healthcare research and practice fully endorses evidence-based healthcare, a minority view borrows popular themes from philosophy of science like underdetermination and value-ladenness to question the legitimacy of the evidence-based movement’s philosophical underpinnings. While the feminist origins go unacknowledged, those critics adopt a feminist reading of the “gap argument” to challenge the perceived objectivism of evidence-based practice. From there, the critics seem to despai…Read more
-
53This paper examines the conclusions that one must draw from the finding that there are values in science. The value-ladenness of scientific claims puts the nature and role of empirical evidence into question, as seen in recent discussions in the philosophy of medicine regarding evidence-based medicine and feminist science studies, which maintains the normativity of its feminist claims. Within the critical literature and debates surrounding evidence-based medicine (EBM), one finds a championing o…Read more
-
81Evidence-based ethics? On evidence-based practice and the "empirical turn" from normative bioethicsBMC Medical Ethics 6 (1): 1-9. 2005.Background The increase in empirical methods of research in bioethics over the last two decades is typically perceived as a welcomed broadening of the discipline, with increased integration of social and life scientists into the field and ethics consultants into the clinical setting, however it also represents a loss of confidence in the typical normative and analytic methods of bioethics. Discussion The recent incipiency of "Evidence-Based Ethics" attests to this phenomenon and should be reject…Read more
-
2639The Problem of Exclusion in Feminist Theory and Politics: A Metaphysical Investigation into Constructing a Category of 'Woman'Journal of Gender Studies 16 (2): 139-153. 2007.The precondition of any feminist politics – a usable category of ‘woman’ – has proved to be difficult to construct, even proposed to be impossible, given the ‘problem of exclusion’. This is the inevitable exclusion of at least some women, as their lives or experiences do not fit into the necessary and sufficient condition(s) that denotes group membership. In this paper, I propose that the problem of exclusion arises not because of inappropriate category membership criteria, but because of the pres…Read more
-
1175Defining quality of care persuasivelyTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 33 (4): 243-261. 2012.As the quality movement in health care now enters its fourth decade, the language of quality is ubiquitous. Practitioners, organizations, and government agencies alike vociferously testify their commitments to quality and accept numerous forms of governance aimed at improving quality of care. Remarkably, the powerful phrase ‘‘quality of care’’ is rarely defined in the health care literature. Instead it operates as an accepted and assumed goal worth pursuing. The status of evidence-based medicine…Read more
Guelph, Ontario, Canada
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
General Philosophy of Science |
PhilPapers Editorships
Philosophy of Medicine |