The Religion & Culture Web Forum
May 2005
Red Medicine, Blue Medicine: Pluralism and the Future of Healthcare
by Farr A. Curlin (University of Chicago) and Daniel E. Hall (Duke University, University of Pittsburgh)
This month, Drs. Curlin and Hall examine the complicated interaction between modern medicine and the faith commitments of both patients and doctors.
The further conventional medicine extends beyond its original domain of “obvious” medical problems, the further it ventures into areas about which different moral traditions disagree. At the center of medical practice, there is substantial inter-traditional consensus that it is a prima facie good to apply conventional medicine’s technical powers to the treatment of acute, severe, organic illnesses. Yet on the margins there is marked disagreement regarding whether and how biomedical science should be applied to regulate sexual function and reproduction, employ life-sustaining technology in the end-of-life context, enhance physical and mental capacities, reshape bodily form, modify human appetites, and control behaviors.
In the contemporary medical context, different moral traditions may agree about the range of legitimate clinical strategies, but disagree about which is to be recommended in a given moment. For example, physicians from different moral traditions may agree that pharmacological therapy, referral to a psychologist, and referral to a clergy person are all legitimate ways of responding to symptoms of what conventional medicine calls “depression,” yet physicians of one moral tradition may be much more likely than those of another to recommend one of the clinical strategies in a given case.
At the beginning of May, invited responses to the essay by Jean Bethke Elshtain and W. Clark Gilpin, both of the University of Chicago, will be posted on the forum's discussion board, where readers are invited to post their own thoughts. The commentary will run through the month of May, after which it will continue to be accessible through the Web Forum archive.
The Martin Marty Center's Religion and Culture Web Forum is an online forum for thought-provoking discussion on the relationship of scholarship in religion to culture and public life. Each month the Marty Center, the research arm of the University of Chicago Divinity School, invites a scholar of religion to comment on his or her own research in a way that "opens out" to themes, problems, and events in world cultures and contemporary life. Scholars from diverse fields of study are invited to offer responses to these commentaries on the forum's discussion board, where the public is also encouraged to post thoughts and reactions to commentaries and invited responses.
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