환자됨의 철학

Abstract

Every human being becomes a patient. In human life, a disease is an unavoidable event like birth, death, and aging. A patient is a person who has a disease. In that sense, the patient and the disease do not separate. However, advances in medicine have separated the patient from the disease. Patients are treated only as carriers of disease, and medical attention has shifted from the patient to the abstracted disease carried by them. As a result, the patient was marginalized from medicine. As medicine advances, the marginalization of patients becomes stronger. Individual autonomy and initiative over their bodies are gradually decreasing. Now, a new insight into the patient's needs as a universal way of being human. The patient should be identified not as an object of medicine nor as a customer. Being a patient is a state everyone wants to avoid if they can. However, as long as we live as human beings, we cannot avoid becoming a patient. To put it more positively, I exist as a human being because I can be a patient. In the era of medical oversupply, paradoxically, where the time to live as a patient has increased, it is necessary to give an active meaning containing a deeper humanistic insight into the patient's being and to search for possible alternatives.