医学史与医学哲学最新文献

{"title":"Population aging, medicalization of death and death education in China","authors":"Yun-Ling Wang","doi":"10.53388/hpm2023020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.53388/hpm2023020","url":null,"abstract":"Since Professor Duan Dezhi opened the course of Death Philosophy at Wuhan University, the development of death education in China has a history of more than 30 years. But it has lacked the clout it deserves in China. However, in recent years, death education has begun to attract more and more attention from the medical community. Various lectures and pieces of training related to death education held by the government and medical institutions, as well as related academic salons, seminars, workshops and “Death Cafes” held by the people have appeared and become popular. Death education has been developed in China for more than 30 years, why has it suddenly become popular and even popular in recent years? This has an important relationship with China’s aging population and the medicalization of death. The research shows that China has entered the aging society since 2000 [1], and has entered the deep aging society so far [2], which brings many challenges to China’s social development. One of the key challenges is that a large number of older people are approaching the end of their lives and are in urgent need of care services. The kind of service they need is not only general life care, but also comprehensive physical, mental, social and spiritual care at the final stage of life. This means that with an aging population comes an increased demand for hospice services. The reason for this is that the aging of the population in China is not only a natural change in the population structure, but also a rapid increase in the absolute number of the population. This is mainly due to the fact that China has experienced three birth peaks in its history, namely, 1950-1958, 1962-1975 and 1981-1994, with an average annual birth population of 22.77, 25.83 and 22.39 million, respectively. It is inevitable to form three population aging shock waves [3], resulting in a substantial increase in the elderly population. Secondly, rapid population aging will directly increase the number of people with high incidence of malignant tumors, resulting in a rapid rise in the number of cases and deaths [4]. Due to the maximum life expectancy of the population, combined with deaths due to malignant tumours, the aging of the population will inevitably lead to more deaths, and therefore will inevitably increase the demand for hospice services. However, the need for hospice is one thing, the actual acceptance and use of hospice is another. The lack of death education and the inability to freely discuss and plan end-of-life arrangements can actually affect the acceptance and use of hospice services, or if hospice services are available, they are not considered until too late, such as two weeks before death, resulting in too little benefit for patients. The theoretical and practical circles of hospice care are well aware of this, so when the National Health Commission vigorously promotes hospice care, death education has gradually become a popular science in China. The medicalizatio","PeriodicalId":61383,"journal":{"name":"医学史与医学哲学","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136258499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}