The importance of philosophy for medical education

Abstract

Medicine considers a scientific-positivist model and advances in the development of health technologies. In this scenario, the humanities are ranked on the second position in Medical Education, thus creating a gap between knowledge about human beings and the biomedical knowledge. Analyzing the curricular matrices of medicine teaching in three of the main medical schools in the State of São Paulo, we found the absence, for example, of the philosophy discipline. In this article, we present the experience of an optional discipline that discussed death in times of Covid-19 pandemic in order to demonstrate that philosophical reflection can contribute to the understanding of patient´s condition – the human, beyond of its biological mechanisms, and in this way, considering it in its subjectivity, not only as a sick body; which could impact the doctor's attitude towards death and the prognosis of irreversible conditions when physiological knowledge alone is not enough.