Abstract

Recent censure of our Western biomedical paradigm has been widespread. The predominant criticism has been that biomedicine's focus upon the objective aspects of disease has led to the inadequate consideration of the subjective aspects of illness, viz., the disordered functions, body sensations and feelings experienced by the patient as a whole person. Primarily in response to this, Drew Leder, Sally Gadow and S. Kay Toombs, among others, have identified biomedicine's assumption of the subject/object distinction within Cartesian dualist subjectivity as the source of its problematic practices. Given that there is no concrete mind/body or subject/object distinction within Merleau-Ponty's phenomenal subject, Leder et al. have sought to address these concerns by formulating a paradigm of medicine based upon this latter subject. ;I will argue that, ironically, it is Leder, Gadow and Toombs' attempt to remain faithful to Merleau-Ponty's philosophical framework that has led to their accounts of illness-as-lived implicitly assuming dualism. As an existential phenomenologist, Merleau-Ponty examines phenomena by describing our everyday experience. Leder, Gadow and Toombs, in examining the experience of illness, primarily describe it as it is experienced by a subject, as is the everyday norm, assuming a dualist lifeworld. That is, the subject apprehends illness in relation to dualist norms, values and subjectivity. This, I will argue, leads to their accounts reproducing the dualism they located as the cause of the perceived problematic biomedical practices. As a consequence, their accounts of illness reproduce the aspects of biomedicine that they were seeking to circumvent. ;Against Leder et al.'s work I will set up an alternative account of illness-as-lived that, in fully capitalising on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy by assuming a phenomenal lifeworld, does not reproduce biomedicine's perceived problematic procedures. The added benefit of this alternative paradigm of medicine is that it is able to provide an account of how psychosocial factors can influence the onset and progression of even genetically inherited diseases. I will then explore how illness with both physical and psychosocial causes should be treated