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P U Unschuld

Publications and source records attributed to P U Unschuld.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2000

[HIV, AIDS and ethics].

The epidemic spread of HIV infections and the AIDS disease in the last two decades of the 20th century has quite unexpectedly confronted European civilization, including North America, with a great number of ethical problems. Today, two decades after the first signs of AIDS' possibly epidemic threat not only to individual regions but to the entire population of the world, we can already answer the questions whether Western society has learned from the past and whether the concern for the rights of the individual and of groups previously discriminated in one way or another (a concern increasing since the 1950 s initially in the USA and then in Europe) has led to a more sensitive stance in dealing with victims of the HIV and AIDS epidemic. In Europe and North America, after initial unrest and occasionally exaggerated reactions, the confrontation with HIV infection and AIDS has mostly shown a marked improvement over the way epidemics and their victims were dealt with in earlier centuries. A substantial difference from earlier epidemics is that the understandable temptation to identify the disease with a specific group of persons has meanwhile been overcome; instead of collectively discriminating against people whose style of life substantially contributes to the spread of the disease, the focus of investigation is on behaviors; increasingly, the actors are not mentioned. There is probably no other disease that touches upon a comparably broad spectrum of ethical principles. HIV infection and the AIDS disease provide models for evaluating almost all basic ethical principles that can find application in a medical context. From the identification of those infected, the search for an effective therapy, the treatment of the diseased, to the compassion with the dying and in many other respects a historically unprecedented degree of taking into regard the interests of groups at risk and of those affected have been taken into account. It is in view of the global dimension of the HIV/AIDS epidemic that a second challenge confronts European civilisation. Here the formulation of relevant politics has not been (and is unlikely to be) influenced by emotions or an abstract morale. Rather, it has been a recognition of a self-interest of Western nations vis-a-vis a possible scenario of a breakdown of public order and democratic structures in some parts of the world that has brought about a reorientation. Increasingly, the resources of governments, of science, and of private enterprise of Western nations are brought together to match the needs of those non-Western countries where the HIV/AIDS epidemic has reached catastrophic dimensions. It may well be that these efforts will support the development of vaccines and therapies affordable in these countries.

Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome↗
PubMed2000

["Perfect virtue": a cross-cultural study of health care in Europe and China].

For the past 2.500 years, the civilizations of Europe and China have integrated heterogeneous therapeutic systems. This paper discusses the circumstances that account for a) basic paradigmatic changes in health care and b) acceptance of mutually antagonistic health care systems within one society. A survey of European and Chinese medical history suggests that conceptualizations of disease and health, prevention and therapy, reflect the political and socio-economic environment affecting a given social group. As emerging concepts of threats, defenses and treatments relating to the social organism arise, they are projected onto the human organism and give rise to new notions of disease. While there are always those who insist on the exclusive validity of a specific theory or treatment, such claims have never been realistic. Both in Europe and in China, most people patronize various treatments, which rest on different and even contradictory conceptualizations of the organism, health and therapy.

China↗
PubMed1997

[Not Available].

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China↗
PubMed1995

Plausibility or truth? An essay on medicine and world view.

This paper introduces the notion of plausibility as a decisive condition for the acceptance by groups in society of fundamental ideas concerning the nature of illness. Plausibility, it is argued, helps to explain both transition from one system of fundamental ideas to another in history, and coexistence of different such systems in a single civilization. Hence this paper challenges an interpretation of medicine prevalent, especially in medical anthropology, since the 1940s, when Erwin Ackerknecht introduced the idea of medicine as an integrated aspect of a society's or community's culture. Because early research focused on small-scale communities where a majority, if not all, of the members adhered to one world view and experienced one and the same existential environment, medicine came to be identified as a cultural system representative of entire communities and, later, societies. Hence we speak of Chinese medicine as if there were one system of therapeutic ideas and practices representative of China as a whole. The fact is that even though medicine is indeed a cultural system, it is representative only of the culture developed by people sharing identical environments and experiences. That is, if within one civilization different groups coexist in different existential realities entailing different notions of what causes crisis and how to maintain harmony, then these groups will believe in different systems of ideas concerning the generation, treatment, and prevention of illness. Such systems of ideas are therefore always metaphorical reflections of a real social environment or of one aspired to. It is not truth (Wahrheit) that leads to an acceptance of basic therapeutic ideas but plausibility (Wahrschein).

China↗
PubMed1987

Traditional Chinese medicine: some historical and epistemological reflections.

So-called Chinese medicine is practiced widely in the U.S.A. and Europe, and traditional Chinese medical concepts are presented, and advocated, through a vast body of secondary literature in European languages, as alternatives to current western interpretations of illness and disease. The present paper analyses some of the values determining the reception of traditional Chinese medicine in the west, and it demonstrates how the cognitive aesthetics of European culture and western science have influenced the selection of specific concepts from a heterogeneous pool of traditional Chinese conceptual systems of health care by western authors in recent years. A comparison of different approaches to health care in traditional Chinese as well as traditional European and modern western medicine suggests that the differences between Chinese and western medicine may not be as clear-cut as they have been portrayed in western secondary literature of the past years. One of the more fundamental dividing lines appears to be the handling of cognitive disagreements, and, possibly related to this, the ubiquitous phenomenon of patterned knowledge in Chinese medicine and culture.

China↗
PubMed1986

[Not Available].

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China↗
PubMed1980

[Not Available].

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China↗