Caregivers’ professional confidentiality: An issue for public health democracy that falls somewhere between immanence and alienation

Varia
By Silvère Pautier
English

For a long time considered as total and absolute, caregivers’ professional confidentiality is today difficult to reconcile with care practices. Lots of paradoxes question its preservation to support the general interest and public order in return for the protection of private interest within an individualistic normative society. Exploring this questioning, this article’s objective is to initiate an ethical discussion by looking at the historical and sociological evolution of caregivers’ professional confidentiality. Thus, with the help of theoretical understandings, especially those of Michel Foucault, medical confidentiality is considered a defense of rationality specific to the government of populations. This conceptualization finds arguments through social collective norms attached to an alienating biopower, at the expense of confidentiality integrated as an individualistic and immanent social norm. However, beyond the well-known debate on the absolute necessity for change and for evolution, the distance from the Socratic and Hippocratic principles engage people and society in real democratic decisions about health. Also, health professionals, patients, users, and society must consider the limits that would lead to medical confidentiality disappearing.

Keywords

  • secret
  • normative
  • biopower
  • neoliberalism
  • alienation
Go to the article on Cairn-int.info