On Dis-ease :: essays research papers

<a href="http//www.geocities.com/vaksam/">Sam Vaknins Psychology, Philosophy, Economics and hostile Affairs Web SitesWe are each(prenominal) terminally ill. It is a numerate of time before we all die. Aging and death remain most as mysterious as ever. We feel awed and uncomfortable when we invent these twin afflictions. Indeed, the very word denoting illness contains its own best commentary dis-ease. A mental component of lack of well being moldiness represent SUBJECTIVELY. The person moldiness FEEL bad, must experience disconcertion for his condition to qualify as a disease. To this extent, we are justified in classifying all dieases "spiritual" or "mental". Is there any some other way of distinguishing health from sickness - a way that does NOT wager on the report tha the patient provides regarding his subjective experience? Some diseases are manifest and others are latent or immanent. Genetic diseases can exist - unmanifested - for generati ons. This raises the philosophical problem or whether a potential disease IS a disease? Are AIDS and Hemophilia carriers - sick? Should they be treated, ethically speaking? They experience no dis-ease, they report no symptoms, no signs are evident. On what moral grounds can we commit them to treatment? On the grounds of the "greater benefit" is the common response. Carriers expose others and must be isolated or otherwise neutered. The threat inherent in them must be eradicated. This is a dangerous moral precedent. All kinds of people threaten our well-being unsettling ideologists, the mentally handicapped, many politicians. Why should we single out our somatogenetic well-being as worthy of a privileged moral berth? Why is our mental well being, for instance, of less import? Moreover, the distinction among the psychic and the bodily is hotly disputed, philosophically. The psychophysical problem is as intractable at present as it ever was (if not more so). It is beyond d oubt that the physical affects the mental and the other way around. This is what disciplines like psychiatry are all about. The ability to control "autonomous" bodily functions (such as heartbeat) and mental reactions to pathogenes of the mentality are proof of the artificialness of this distinction. It is a result of the reductionist view of spirit as divisible and summable. The sum of the parts, alas, is not always the whole and there is no such thing as an infinite set of the rules of nature, wholly an asymptotic approximation of it. The distinction between the patient and the outside public is superfluous and wrong.