Talk:Philosophy of healthcare

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 23 January 2020 and 10 March 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Alexander Quellhorst. Peer reviewers: Nkerry2265.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 06:33, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

This article is awful - It should be deleted
It looks to me like a fork. It focuses heavily on the U.S.' political controversies and looks like just another attempt to use WP to capture minds thinking about the debate in that country. Everything here could be covered in Medical ethics or Healthcare politics.


 * Whoever wrote the previous comment, (Hauskalainen), I would appreciate it if you would adhere to Wikipedia's talk-page guidelines, i.e. - signing your name with four tildes at the end of your comments. And with respect to the article, it is not entirely awful as you so whimsically claim. Although the article maintains a predominantly U.S. viewpoint toward healthcare issues, it also provides a substantial degree of philosophical insight into many of the pressing problems facing healthcare today. Granted, this article treats healthcare as a business rather than a social service, but that is precisely where European users, like yourself, need to contribute, and thus, enhance the article. Thank you for your time. FitzColinGerald (talk) 15:30, 9 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Sorry. Failure to sign was an oversight. I am always logged in so I am not hard to track down. My first observation was that this was an article on the philosophy of health care and it does not even mention Hippocrates once. Then I noticed the preponderance of the rather tiresome debate issues in the U.S. which seems to infect so many WP articles on health. These are mostly local issues and not global ones. Maybe my comments were harsh, but there is indeed a huge overlap with the two alternative articles I suggest. I still think it is a fork and not worthy of retention.--Tom (talk) 20:50, 9 April 2008 (UTC)


 * I am not sure that I fully understand what you mean when you characterize this article as a "fork." If by fork you mean that this article takes bits and pieces from other articles and plays them off as its own, then I concur with your point. However, this is a philosophy article. And as such, I feel that its purpose is to compile, consolidate, and synthesize all relevant information on the topic of healthcare. Likewise, this article does not attempt to rehash all of the ethical and political perspectives on healthcare. In fact, the "Birth and Death" section contains a variety of philosophical sentiments that are not overly expressed elsewhere on Wikipedia. FitzColinGerald (talk) 21:44, 9 April 2008 (UTC)


 * This article needs drastic changing to reflect that healthcare exists outside the United States. Restepc (talk) 14:58, 15 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, I agree completely, but I also believe that your qualms have already been echoed. All we need now is for someone to heed these calls for reform and revision. Someone with expertise in healthcare philosophy outside the U.S. would be wholly welcomed here. FitzColinGerald (talk) 21:39, 15 April 2008 (UTC)


 * I also agree. Starting with "Ethics in Healthcare," this looks like an essay (written by a feminist (No offense) (I count: three her's; five she's; one herself; and no masculine pronouns)). Yeah dude, PowerUserPCDude was here (yeah) (talk) 19:36, 5 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Someone purposefully rearranged the pronoun wording to reflect a feminist outlook. The original wording of the "Ethics in Healthcare" section reflected more of a gender neutral perspective. Hopefully, this kind of bias will be kept at bay in the future. FitzColinGerald (talk) 15:31, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

New Zealand
I've deleted a recent edit about healthcare in New Zealand because it's a copyright violation. The source is http://www.acc.co.nz/about-acc/overview-of-acc/introduction-to-acc/index.htm. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 02:49, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The UDHR does not say that "any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else", nor does the text at the link given contain that statement. The line is actually part of a 1967 statement by U Thant given in "Declaration on Population: The World Leaders Statement", printed in Studies in Family Planning, January 1968, pp. 1-3. U Thant said "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else. But this right of parents to free choice will remain illusory unless they are aware of the alternatives open to them."

I don't know enough about Garrett Hardin to rewrite this, but if Hardin thinks that the UDHR states this, he is in error. In "The Tragedy of the Commons" he does quote U Thant as saying this and incorrectly says that "some thirty nations agreed to it"--what the thirty nations had agreed to was the UDHR, not U Thant's interpretation of it--but I don't know anything about his alleged opposition to the UDHR or his basis for it. But it seems to me that the article should be rewritten to reflect this misattribution, at the very least. Torkmusik (talk) 01:57, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

Information Literacy - A Thought on Americentrism
As the page indicates, the Wikipedia article regarding the "Philosophy of Healthcare" is centered around the discussions that take place in the United States. The article would greatly benefit from additions concerning non-American points of view on reproductive rights, euthanasia, etc. Similarly, I imagine that ethical conversations surrounding healthcare would differ greatly depending on cultural norms. For such an engaging topic, I would imagine that this article could have been at least twice as lengthy. Overall, I don't think the article is overly skewed in any direction, but that is not to say that it is completely without bias. A question I have for future editors of this article: Is the quality of available healthcare in any given country an important factor in the resulting philosophy thereof?--Alexander Quellhorst (talk) 20:27, 29 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Might I suggest that someone who aspires to 'internationalize' this article begin first with a cross-cultural study of the ethics of healthcare, making special note to include religious and nonreligious discussions (e.g. Iranian and Indian and Buddhist, as in Tzu Chi, philosophies of healthcare could be real eye-openers). But may I suggest that, with a little configuration, the topics are pretty much the same and include many of the same discussions (e.g. who is responsible for what inputs and outcomes? what about tradeoffs? who gets the benefits and why?). MaynardClark (talk) 05:58, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

I've added a paragraph under the new sub-heading "Religious Ethics" as part of a class assignment. Using several scholarly sources regarding religiosity, I'm hoping to add the philosophical implications of religion on health care (at least as its known to us in the West). Common religious themes such as love/compassion and human dignity have been instrumental in how patients/clients are treated by health care professionals, and should be mentioned in this page. I'll be visiting this page frequently to see if anyone has any objections or suggestions to my edits.Alexander Quellhorst (talk) 21:36, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

I believe that most of the instances of the term "healthcare" ought to be changed to "health care", which denotes the actual provision of health care, as opposed to a developed system of healthcare.Alexander Quellhorst (talk) 21:36, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

My bibliography: Sansom, Dennis. “Healthcare, Religious Obligations, and Caring for the Poor.” Ethics and Medicine: An International Journal of Bioethics, vol. 35, no. 2, June 2019, pp. 117–126. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=pif&AN=PHL2387971&site=ehost-live. SEVENSKY, ROBERT. “The Religious Foundations of Health Care: A Conceptual Approach.” Journal of Medical Ethics: The Journal of the Institute of Medical Ethics, vol. 9, Sept. 1983, pp. 165–168. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=pif&AN=PHL1121645&site=ehost-live. O’Riley, Christine A. “Protecting the Free Exercise of Religion in Health Care Delivery.” The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 3, Sept. 2017, pp. 425–434. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=pif&AN=PHL2373523&site=ehost-live. Alexander Quellhorst (talk) 23:05, 16 February 2020 (UTC)