Dr Hilary Bowman-Smart1
1University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia
Biography:
Hilary Bowman-Smart is a Research Fellow at the Australian Centre for Precision Health, University of South Australia. She is an empirical bioethicist with a background in both genetics and philosophy. Her areas of focus are reproductive ethics, genomics, and the philosophy of medicine.
Abstract:
In the age of precision medicine and data-driven healthcare, our understanding of the concept, process and significance of diagnosis is undergoing a profound shift. Technologies such as genomics and machine learning can now provide access and insight into enormous amounts of complex information about individuals and populations. While this is often seen as a means to make diagnoses more accurate and allow the development of more precise diagnostic criteria, this also has the potential to re-shape our understanding of the process of diagnosis itself. The increasing use of these technologies sit alongside rapidly expanding phenomena such as self-diagnosis, including direct-to-consumer genetic testing and home self-testing kits; the rise of online private digital health clinics; different perspectives on diagnosis and identity; and in an ageing population, the increasing number of people receiving diagnoses of any kind. This in turn raises critical conceptual questions about what it means when someone is diagnosed, what that diagnosis does, who gets to make diagnoses, and what counts as a “legitimate” or “real” diagnosis. In this presentation, I will explore the ethical, social and philosophical issues associated with these technologies and practices, and our changing conceptualisations of diagnosis. I will then examine the process of diagnosis as speech act – where, by saying something, we do something. What DO we do when we diagnose?