Medicine, Mind and Adolescence 1999, XIV, 1-2
THE MANIFESTO OF PERSON-CENTRED MEDICINE
Giuseppe Rodolfo Brera1
Giuseppe Rodolfo Brera1
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Abstract
“Person - centred medicine” represents a new epistemologic orientation for medical science. The components of the paradigm derive firstly from an acknowledgement of the impact of Christianity on the History of medicine, secondly from kairological introspection, which, starting from phenomenological and anthropo-analytical premises, provides evidence of teleonomy in human nature, thirdly from the indeterminate relation between biological reactions and the quality of coping, the epistemological foundation of the interactivity shown by biological research, and finally from the emergence in the epistemological field of a new concept of health based on quality of life and the individual person’s resources.
Person-centred medicine is a new medical concept based on the acknowledgement of the fact that valuing and giving value to human life from conception to natural death is the ultimate justification of medical knowledge. The individual human being can never be the tool of science or of economic or political interests, laws, ideologies, theories or religious dogma.
The basis of this philosophy, of which I had the honour and the responsibility of being maieuta, rests on a theoretical synthesis between the quality of knowledge derived from experimental research and that derived from humanistic clinical research.
This approach has already been extensively evaluated in the postgraduate medical courses of the Ambrosiana University in Milan and has been validated by the extraordinary improvements in the quality of medical profession. The Manifesto represents the Epistemological programme of the Ambrosiana University Milan Medical School “Scuola Normale Superiore di Medicina”.
Person-centred medicine aims to modify the bio-molecular reductionist approach to medical science in favour of an integration which makes doctors, nurses and patients true protagonists of the health scenario.
In science and education, “The person-centred paradigm” represents a challenge to develop research and education methods based, not on conjectures, but on the interactionism and on the teleonomic theory, which is founded on the relativity of biological reactions to the quality of coping as has been confirmed by numerous experimental studies.
In the second millennium jubilee of the birth of Jesus Christ, we affirm our hope that “Person – centred medicine” may complement the values of Hypocratic medicine by the concept of the sanctity of human life and the individual human being as God’s gift to the World, which through the dominion of Christ has constituted occidental culture.
1. Correspondence to: Giuseppe R. Brera, Università Ambrosiana, V.le Romagna 51, 20133 Milano (Italy). E-mail: gbrera@unambro.it.
