As the number of chronic diseases increases due to the aging population, medical practitioners are increasingly faced with the need to understand the social backgrounds of their patients and experience uncertainty and irrationality in treatment prospects. Medical treatment, which applies scientific knowledge to the clinical environment, is considered a social science, but methods for medical education using social science insights have not yet been established in Japan. Unlearning, which moves away from definitions based on intellectual understanding and questions the nature of things through physical sensation, is an epistemological method that cultivates anthropologists in the process of fieldwork. Could this methodology be applied to medical education?
Education has two very different word meanings from Latin. One is "to inculcate knowledge (educere)" and the other is "to lead out (e. ducere)." The latter is metaphorically described by anthropologist Tim Ingold as "walking the labyrinth to pull away from all positions." In other words, it is “Unlearning”. Unlearning leads to the debris of conceptual knowledge. The social meanings, roles, and definitions of "patient", "disabled", "elderly", "health", etc. will be questioned. Knowledge can sometimes be kept from showing its true nature. In clinical practice, attention tends to focus on "certainty" and "objectivity", but Unlearning will enable us to value not only the objectivity of the data obtained from health examinations but also the first-person subjectivity that arises in the process and reality.
The presenter has been conducting a comparative study of the knowledge acquisition methods of informal traditional practitioners (vaidya) through apprenticeship and Ayurvedic doctors through medical colleges in South India. She also conducts lectures in the form of " case conferences " so that medical students can simulate fieldwork in the classroom.
In this presentation, she will introduce the research and discuss educational methods that induce "unlearning" with reference to anthropological epistemology.
