Foundations of Health Care

This book is a collection of articles about communication and ethics in the field of medicine and health care. Common to all the articles is that they are not directly based on empirical investigations. The discussions refer to research that has already been carried out and documented in existing literature. In this sense, the articles belong to what is often called applied philosophy. All the articles address communicative and ethical challenges in patient interaction on the basis of assumptions in modern moral philosophy and philosophy of language. There is a great need for literature that deals more comprehensively with the themes discussed in this book. It is particularly difficult to find suitable material that can be used in teaching at the graduate and master levels. Foundations of Health Care is designed to meet this need. It is suitable for use in all higher-level courses where the aim is to give students a theoretical understanding of ethical dilemmas and communicative challenges in health care.