To understand what we are as human beings – to make sense of our place as vibrant, morally conscious individuals in the physical world – there is no better place to look than medicine.

 

It’s taken me a long time to see this and say it out loud, because it’s taken philosophy such a long time to look in this direction.  Whatever we might learn from science about our physicality, and whatever we might learn from art, from ethics, or from love about our humanity, we are accustomed to a certain distance between these two kinds of perspectives.  In medicine, though, we must see through both lenses at once.  We address in great scientific detail the sense in which we are physical things, as we address in great humanistic detail the sense in which each of us is a unique individual with experiences that matter.  

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As the two come together in medicine they force us to a philosophical conundrum, the “hard problem of consciousness”, the question of how to make scientific sense of private human experiences.  As I see it, we arrive in medicine at the mind-body problem in its truest and most meaningful form – because here the stakes are as high as they could be.  While in philosophy we can entertain the wildest explorations of what experience might amount to, in medicine when we get it wrong, real people suffer.  When medical doctors or psychiatrists entertain incoherent ideas about mind and body, they make bad decisions about how to assist us in being well.  

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My work takes three forms, though all of them seem like the same project to me:

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(1) Philosophy of Mind

Medicine is in a real fix when it comes to mind and body because basic terms like “dualism” have been misunderstood.  While medicine is free to use any terminology as it sees fit, it will never work to use terms in ways that are actually self-refuting.  I do my best to sort out and explain what’s gone wrong with medicine’s mind-body picture, and to explain the steps needed to put things back on track.  Click here for a recent interview I did for Psychiatric Times about mind-body confusions in psychiatry and their ramifications. I did an interview on doctors and dualism with Australian National Ratio - click here to have a listen.

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(2) Clinical Medicine 

We can track medicine’s mind-body confusions into recommendations for practice, and we can track the errors they cause in diagnosis and treatment.  My work in this area centers on cases where patients have medically unexplained symptoms that could be caused either by bodily disease or by psychological distress.  Surprising as it may be, cases of this kind are roughly as common as all the cases of diagnosis combined!  Unexplained symptoms are the bread and butter of everyday medicine, but as things stand, doctors’ directives for managing these symptoms are guided by incoherent mind-body jargon rather than science.  This is not good for any of us, as patients. Click here for a recent lecture I gave on this kind of thing at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins. Click here for an article I wrote, for IAI News, that explains how philosophical confusion threatens your medical care.)

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(3) Gender Equity

Women are uniquely threatened by medicine’s mind-body jumble, because doctors’ training on women’s healthcare is focused on this kind of thing.  Medical gaslighting, as most women know it, does not arise from doctors’ personal biases, in other words.  It arises from medical training that uses vague mind-body jargon to encourage outdated social ideas about women and their uncontrollable emotions.  For this reason, I often write and speak about safe, ethical care for medical conditions that mostly affect women, like long covid, autoimmune disease, ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and chronic Lyme. I do my best to contribute to health policy that affects patient care in these areas, and sometimes I testify as an expert witness. Click here for a recent opinion piece I wrote for CNN about medical gaslighting. For an article in Cognoscenti, where I explain gender inequity in healthcare, click here.

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Click here for a terrific article in Vice News, by Alan Levinovitz, that features my work: "The Medical System Should Have Been Prepared for Long Covid".

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And here's a productive debate I had with Adam Gaffney on the STAT News First Opinion Podcast:  "A physician and a philosopher on long Covid's mind-body mystery".

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For the philosophically minded, here's my "5-Minute Fellows" video from the Center for Philosophy of Science at University of Pittsburgh.

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