Abstract: The article addresses the status of contemporary medical education. It is demonstrated that these days reductionism is predominant in biology and medicine influencing greatly medical education. An emergent need in holistic and integrative biomedicine is felt. The author introduces ideas of new medical-humanitarian education, discusses the principles of its organization.
In modern conditions, the medical education system lays on a great responsibility to counteract unfavorable trends, correct the existing value and professional stereotypes, and introduce a systematic policy of training new generations of medical workers and pro fessors.
Big importance in the training of medical workers is the classics of medicine - the works of the great doctors of the past, in which moral questions are inherently connected with the problems of practical assistance. The Englishspeaking country medical tradition is exceptionally rich in ideas about the humanitarian values of medicine and the importance of a broad humanitarian context (ethical, psychological, cultural) in the treatment process.
The rapid development of scientific medicine at the end of the twentieth century and the widespread introduction of modern sophisticated technologies into practical health care pose the task of humanizing the physician as an important part of medical ethics. The moral and humanistic aspects of such advances in biomedical sciences deserve special attention.
How to build this education, what type of doctor should be trained within its framework, what type of knowledge and practice should be used to form an integrative-thinking and acting specialist who is able not to lose all the advantages of reductionist medicine and at the same time has the advantages of an integral view of the phenomenon of life, health and disease?
These are all difficult questions that require special research. Let me state below a number of considerations about the possible structure and requirements for the system of medical and humanitarian education.
One of the main tasks of integrative medicine and the synthetic methodology behind it should be the development of the principles of such an expanded scientific methodology and its introduction into the structure of medical and humanitarian education.
The theoretical line of medical and humanitarian education should be based on such integral models, built within the framework of an expanded scientific methodology and based on new integral theoretical constructions.
The general line seems to us to be expressed as an important reference point, some necessary condition for the development of integrative medicine and medical and humanitarian education, which is important to follow in order to move in the right direction.
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