Clinical Ethics in the Context of Medical Humanities

Medical humanities are vital for increasing clinical effectiveness. There is a crisis in medicine and bioethics as the epistemological status of medicine has been challenged and the goals of healthcare are often in tension. The medical humanities find their core in ethics reflections and have partially resolved the crisis which occurred in medicine by highlighting that the main focus of medicine is the care of the sick person through the doctor-patient relationship and in bioethics by highlighting that the individual patient and their history can strongly influence therapeutic decisions. There is an important relationship between medical humanities and the concept of acknowledgment. Clinical ethics consultations should be recognized as the main place where to redirect medical humanities into daily clinical practice empirically. Medical humanities training is taking place in Italy, and it discusses different dimensions of the contribution of medical humanities to biomedicine.