The Logic of Care by Annemarie Mol

Introduction

The Logic of Care is a philosophic book. The book is written from a patient perspective. Therefore it is easy to understand and easy to read. This review is written for people working in the health care and for the patient’s movement. It is important that people in the health care start thinking about the choices the patients have to make.

Content of the book

The author of the book “The Logic of Care” is Annemarie Mol. Mol is a Dutch ethnographer and philosopher. Mol describes how the ideal of choosing clashes with the reality of living with a sick body. Her book was published in 2006. The Logic of Care is a philosophical book, with applications and examples from the healthcare.

The book investigates what good care is. The writer is looking for an alternative for the popular belief that the people need a free choice to let them lead a good life. In four years the writer collected all material for the book by fieldwork in the health care. The material is based on interviews with nurses, internists and patients with diabetes. The writer observed how the daily practice of diabetes works. Dialogues and gestures are detected. All these experiences were translated into the writers words. The writer wrote especially for the patient movement. In addition she wrote for people working in the health care, who have difficulty with the logic of choice. Furthermore, the writer tries to make place for stories in the political dialog by using the logic of care.

The book makes a comparison between the logic of care and the logic of choice. The logic of care is the central topic of the book. While the other, the logic of choice, makes its point of contrast. The logic of choice is considered as something good in the Western philos...

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...ts, diseases, medical professionals, knowledge and technological artefacts. Her book is a request to experts and patients to live up to the encounters of good care.

The logic of choice is increasingly imposed on health care mainly by legalization and economization. Laws assume that people make choices. For example the law BIG says that a doctor provide information to a patient and the patient comes to a choice on basis of the information from the doctor. But it is not clear what the reason is to choose for a particular treatment. Because the patient wants that treatment? But how can a patient know what he/she want, when the logic of care is not predictable and insecure? It is important that everyone is going to think about this. This book provides many insights and it certainly puts you to think. The book can certainly provide more discussion in the health care.