Medical humanities reveals the neglected aspects of the covid 19 pandemic

The Olympiad for Medical Sciences Students has been held in the field of medical humanities for several years in Iran. This year, with the outbreak of the corona pandemic, the question arose as to whether this student competition could be adapted to this new and complex situation. This article will explain the joint efforts of the scientific committee and biomedical students to address this challenge. The main question we had to answer was whether the medical humanities have anything to say in the face of the corona pandemic. The danger we felt was that as the corona pandemic crisis deepened, the biomedical narrative would fill the entire discourse, and this would ultimately lead to the ineffectiveness of corona interventions and policies. This paper shows how these questions were addressed through an action research that the scientific committee, as an interdisciplinary team, and several groups of medical students have worked on together. The result showed that criticism of classical medical humanities, return to the roots of interdisciplinarity, attention to the role of technology, and the crucial role of biopolitics are the neglected aspects of the Covid 19 pandemic. © 2021, Vesnu Publications. All rights reserved.

Health lag: medical philosophy reflects on COVID-19 pandemic

In this paper, we reflect on the COVID-19 pandemic based on medical philosophy. A critical examination of the Corona crisis uncovers that in order to understand and explain the unpreparedness of the health systems, we need a new conceptual framework. This helps us to look at this phenomenon in a new way, address new problems, and come up with creative solutions. Our proposal is that "health lag" is a concept that could help frame and explain this unpreparedness and unreadiness. The term "health lag" refers to the failure of health systems to keep up with clinical medicine. In other words, health issues in most situations fall behind clinical medicine, leading to social, cultural, and economic problems. In the first step to define health lag, we have to explain the distinction between clinical medicine and health and address the role of individual health, public health, and epidemic in this dichotomy. Thereafter, the reasons behind health lag will be analyzed in three levels: theoretical, practical, and institutional. In the third step, we will point out the most important consequences of health lag: the medicalization of health, the inconsistency of biopolitics, inadequate ethical frameworks, and public sphere vulnerabilities. Finally, we try to come up with a set of recommendations based on this philosophical-conceptual analysis.

Three health-related paradoxes in the COVID 19 pandemic

Health is enigmatic in nature, in the sense that people pay attention to it when they have lost it. This enigmatic nature of health is the context for expressing health-related paradoxes. The paradoxes of digitalization, isolation, and prevention that have become prominent in the COVID 19 pandemic are elaborated in this article. The digitalization paradox demonstrates that we have procrastinated in digitalizing daily life, but have the digital tools to communicate with others and share information in quarantine. The isolation paradox means that "social distancing" is required to prevent infection, but loneliness can make us sick. The "paradox of prevention” arises when reducing the risk of persons in medium-risk to low-risk groups has a greater impact on the overall risk in the population than only reducing the risk of persons in high-risk groups. All three paradoxes reflect the complexity and uncertainty of circumstances in a pandemic and the need for medical humanities. © 2020, Vesnu Publications. All rights reserved.