A Sketch for a Hermeneutical Conception of Health and Illness

In this article we provide an account of why, due to the fact of overcoming the mechanical and reductive worldview, modern medicine has faced a crisis. This crisis could be called the quality of care crisis. Then we will try to find a way out of this crisis, through providing a hermeneutical conception of health and illness, based on Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology. According to such approach, in contrast to a mechanical and reductive approach, illness would not be a biological malfunction in a person’s organs, but it should be understood in relation to with existential concerns as part of his lived experience in a lived world. Certainly, this conception of health and illness has consequences that determine the way in which the physician and patient encounter each other and diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. The result of this is that medicine would become an encounter between two people. An encounter which aims is to help the patient to come back to the ordinary routines of life through understanding him.