転換期医療における医療実践者の課題(シンポジウム 転換期医療における人間の問題)

抄録

The technical improvements in medication in the late twentieth century have caused a great change in the relationship between medical specialists and patients. Medical specialists tend to treat a patient as a pure object of technology; they tend to take into account only information as to the patient's physical conditions, which is derived from high-tech medical tests. But it must be noted that many diseases such as adult diseases cannot be cured by technological means only. In those cases, medical specialists have to care not only for the patient's body, but also for the patient's psychological conditions, social relations, and so on. In the field of "ultramodern medication", medical specialists intervene directly in the life and death of the human being by using the technologies of reproductive-medicine and those of transplantation-medicine. Such interventions are ethical, I think, only on the conditions that 1) patients are well informed about those treatments and they themselves want them voluntarily, and 2) there is a social agreement on utilizing those treatments.