Now showing 1 - 10 of 23
  • Some of the metrics are blocked by your 
    Item type:Publication,
    Mental health-related, existential, and biological factors are associated with the desire to hasten death in Mexican cancer patients undergoing palliative care: A single-center study
    (Public Library of Science (PLoS), 2025)
    Rodríguez-Mayoral, Oscar
    ;
    Monreal-Carrillo, Edith
    ;
    Contreras-Yáñez, Irazú
    ;
    Allende-Pérez, Silvia
    ;
    Introduction: The wish to hasten death (WTHD) is a clinically significant phenomenon that arises from complex suffering. It has been predominantly studied in Caucasian populations, emphasizing the importance of gaining more diverse cultural perspectives. This study explores the factors associated with the WTHD in Mexican cancer patients receiving palliative care from one academic center, with a specific focus on its connection to dignity.“. Patients and methods: The study, a cross-sectional research conducted between October 12, 2023, and August 30, 2024, involved patients with confirmed cancer diagnoses who were attending a palliative care service. Patients had applied the Patient Dignity Inventory (PDI), Schedule of Attitudes Toward Hastened Death (SAHD), Brief Edinburgh Depression Scale (BEDS), EORTC QLQ-C15-PAL to assess health-related quality of life, Karnofsky Performance Status Scale (KPSS) to assess functional capacity, and the Edmonton Symptom Assessment System. A PDI score ≥55 indicated a fractured sense of dignity (DPD), while a SAHD score ≥1 indicated the WTHD. Factors associated with the WTHD were identified using multiple logistic regression analysis. The study was approved by the IRB. Results: The study included 302 primarily middle-aged (54.5 [45–64]) females (225 [74.5%]), with 9 years of education. They reported high severity of well-being (7 [1–7]) and tiredness (3 [0–6]). Their median KPSS score showed independence (80 [70–80]), despite impacts across all EORTC QLQ-C15-PAL dimensions. DPD was noted in 110 patients (36.5%). The most frequent diagnoses were breast cancer (114 [38%]), lung cancer (33 [11%]), and gastrointestinal cancer (28 [9%]). The WTHD was found in 94 patients (31.1%). Factors significantly associated included tiredness score (OR: 1.147, 95% CI: 1.044–1.261, p = 0.004), BEDS score (1.181, 1.085–1.284, p ≤ 0.001) and a DPD (1.979, 1.038–3.772, p = 0.04). Conclusions: The WTHD was found in one out of every three Mexican cancer patients receiving palliative care and was linked to biological-, mental health-, and existential-related factors. ©The authors ©Public Library of Science (PLoS) ©PLOS one
  • Some of the metrics are blocked by your 
    Item type:Publication,
    Science and Experience of the Holy
    (Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2025)
    The experience of the holy can be seen as part of the effort of human beings to construct a meaningful world. This perspective reveals that science and religion have both presented themselves in human history as strong values, characterized by different “types” of knowledge (with different degrees of certainty to which they aspire) and different goals. That they have often been able to integrate smoothly and at other times appear distant from each other is part of the historicity of human affairs. Today it is necessary for religious discourse to be able to express itself in a culture strongly permeated by the scientific mentality. As the paper tries to show, this capacity essentially depends on being able to clarify how scientific knowledge can be reconciled with the concept of a radical hope in a life beyond death, understood as an essential integration of meaning in human life. ©The author ©Springer.
  • Some of the metrics are blocked by your 
    Item type:Publication,
    Un enfoque sistémico de la bioética del medioambiente y la complejidad
    <jats:p>La teoría general de sistemas ofrece un marco conceptual y metodológico para integrar consideraciones bioéticas en la toma de decisiones ambientales y ecológicas, enmarcando clara y eficazmente muchos problemas y situaciones que suelen presentarse utilizando el lenguaje ordinario. Un sistema es una entidad estructurada internamente que se caracteriza por algunas propiedades y funciones específicas. Esta unidad se relaciona con varias de sus partes que también son sistemas y son, por tanto, sus subsistemas. A su vez, cada sistema es parte (es decir, subsistema) de sistemas de orden superior. Todos estos sistemas y subsistemas están relacionados entre sí de tal manera que cada uno se caracteriza por sus propiedades específicas, que, además, resultan de las correlaciones que los unen a sus subsistemas y sistemas de orden superior. Dentro de esta arquitectura general se inscriben fácilmente conceptos como entorno y complejidad, así como emergencia, con todos los problemas relativos a los límites de las posibilidades de predicción mostrando que los enfoques deterministas tradicionales en la ciencia son insuficientes para manejar tal complejidad. El artículo aborda los desafíos que plantea la impredecibilidad en los sistemas complejos, criticando las visiones fatalistas que aceptan de manera optimista o pesimista la naturaleza incontrolable de los desarrollos tecnológicos y ecológicos. Es precisamente la impredecibilidad de un sistema complejo como el entorno lo que requiere una dimensión bioética para guiar los valores que subyacen a nuestra toma de decisiones respecto a la vida misma.</jats:p>
      29
  • Some of the metrics are blocked by your 
    Item type:Publication,
    The Multiple Aspects of the Philosophy of Science
    Philosophy of Science, understood as a special philosophical discipline, was born only at the beginning of the twentieth century as part of the effort for overcoming the “foundational crisis” that had affected especially mathematics and physics. Therefore, it was conceived as an investigation about the features and reliability of scientific knowledge and for a few decades was deeply marked by the philosophical approach of logical empiricism. This cognitive point of view persisted also when, after Kuhn’s work, the attention focused on the scientific activity in order to understand scientific change and a sociological model replaced the view that empirical adequacy and logical consistency are the factors that determine the change of scientific theories. Ethical, social and political considerations regarding science ware considered inappropriate and potentially dangerous since they violate the alleged “neutrality of science” with respect to values. Nevertheless, the strict intertwining of science and technology in contemporary “technoscience” has produced a wide debate regarding the practical aspect of technoscientific activity that has the intrinsic features of a philosophical debate. Therefore, it is natural and advisable that the entire wealth of the philosophical disciplines (and not just logic, ontology, epistemology and philosophy of language) be called to contribute to the specific complex discourse of the Philosophy of Science.
    Scopus© Citations 1  9
  • Some of the metrics are blocked by your 
    Item type:Publication,
    The truth of theories and scientific realism
    (Springer International Publishing, 2017)
    The thesis maintained in this paper is that scientific anti-realism was the consequence of having lost the confidence in the capability of science to attain truth, something that historically occurred at the end of the nineteenth century. Therefore, the requirement of truth was removed from science and replaced by the requirement of objectivity. This has a ‘weak’ sense, according to which scientific knowledge is ‘independent of the single subjects’ (intersubjectivity) In addition, however, every science is considered to investigate not reality in general, but only its specific objects (‘strong’ ontological sense of objectivity). These specific objects are ‘clipped out’ of the reality of common sense ‘things’ by considering them from a specific point of view focusing only on certain attributes of reality. In order to determine these clips, the scientific community elaborates certain standardized operational procedures for establishing whether certain statements regarding things are immediately true or false. In such a way these operational procedures are ‘criteria of reference’ and ‘criteria of truth’ for a given science, and moreover turn out to be the same used for securing objectivity in the weak sense. This amounts to recovering the characteristic of truth for scientific knowledge, and giving it a realist interpretation both ontologically and epistemologically, at least for its empirically testable statements. The contemporary struggle about realism, however, regards the unobservable entities introduced in scientific theories, and the strategy proposed in the present paper is that of suitably ‘extending’ to theories the notion of truth, which is immediately and directly defined for single declarative statements. From the referential nature of truth follows that if we have reasons for admitting the truth of a theory, we must also admit, for the same reasons, the existence of its referents, even when they are unobservable entities. ©Springer International Publishing.
    Scopus© Citations 2  3  1
  • Some of the metrics are blocked by your 
    Item type:Publication,
    Factors associated with the quality of the patient-doctor relationship: a cross-sectional study of ambulatory Mexican patients with rheumatic diseases
    (2021)
    Pascual-Ramos, Virginia
    ;
    Contreras-Yáñez, Irazú
    ;
    Ortiz-Haro, Ana Belén
    ;
    Molewijk, Albert Christiaan
    ;
    Background: The patient-doctor relationship (PDR) is a complex phenomenon with strong cultural determinants, which impacts health-related outcomes and, accordingly, does have ethical implications. The study objective was to describe the PDR from medical encounters between 600 Mexican outpatients with rheumatic diseases and their attending rheumatologists, and to identify factors associated with a good PDR. Methods: A cross-sectional study was performed. Patients completed the PDRQ-9 (Patient-Doctor Relationship Questionnaire, 9 items), the HAQ-DI (Health Assessment Questionnaire Disability Index), the Short-Form 36 items (SF-36), a pain–visual analog scale, and the Ideal Patient Autonomy Scale. Relevant sociodemographic, disease-related, and treatment-related variables were obtained. Patients assigned a PDRQ-9 score to each patient-doctor encounter. Regression analysis was used to identify factors associated with a good PDR, which was defined based on a cutoff point established using the borderline performance method. Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc.
    Scopus© Citations 4  23  2
  • Some of the metrics are blocked by your 
    Item type:Publication,
    Truth between semantics and pragmatics
    Truth had been excluded from the requirements of science after the so-called "foundationa crisis" of the exact sciences (mathematics and physics) occurred between the end o the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. A formalistic outlook had imposed itself i the philosophy of science, from which meaning and truth were excluded. This approach, however was seriously weakened after the discovery of the "internal limitations of formalisms entailed by Goedel's theorems, and Tarski almost at the same time advocated the legitimac of meaning and truth for the formalized languages, calling "semantics" this part of the metatheoretica investigations. This terminology has remained standard especially in mathematica logic. One must note, however, that semantics regards in a proper sense the level of meaning whereas truth implies in addition the reference of the language to some extralinguistic domai of entities. This domain is not accessible by means of logical, linguistic or conceptual analysis but can be attained through "operations" of some concrete kind, whose nature determines als the ontological status of the referents. Operations belong to praxis, and this is why the notio of truth is more properly attributed to "pragmatics", understood not in the original Morris sense, but rather in a sense closer to pragmatism, in which the performance of actions is considere essential for providing criteria of truth.
      2  1
  • Some of the metrics are blocked by your 
    Item type:Publication,
    Concordance among patients and physicians about their ideal of autonomy impacts the patient-doctor relationship: A cross-sectional study of Mexican patients with rheumatic diseases
    (2020)
    Pascual-Ramos, Virginia
    ;
    Contreras-Yáñez, Irazú
    ;
    Ortiz-Haro, Ana Belén
    ;
    Molewijk, Albert Christiaan
    ;
    Introduction: In patient-doctor interaction both parties play a role. Primary objective was to determine if the concordance among rheumatologists and their patients of their ideal of autonomy was associated with a better patient-doctor relationship. Secondary objective was to describe factors associated to a patient paternalistic ideal of autonomy (PPIA). Materials and methods: This cross-sectional study had 3 steps. Step-1 consisted in translation/cultural local adaption of Ideal Patient Autonomy Scale (IPAS), a 14-items Dutch questionnaire. Step-2 consisted of IPAS validity and reliability in 201 outpatients. Step-3 consisted of the application of IPAS and the patient-doctor relationship questionnaire (PDRQ) to 601 outpatients with a medical encounter, and of IPAS to the 21 attending rheumatologists. Each patient-physician encounter was classified into with/without concordance in the ideal of autonomy and PRDQ scores were compared (Man Whitney U test). Regression analysis was used for associations. ©PLOS One
    Scopus© Citations 3  19  2
  • Some of the metrics are blocked by your 
    Item type:Publication,
    The problems of scientific realism today
    The article describes scientific realism and the debate around this position. It shows that initially (in the scholastic tradition) the debate between realists and antirealists was purely ontological, since it was accepted that when we know, we know the real − knowledge cannot be anything other than knowledge of the real. The question about the reality of the object of our knowledge, about whether the world beyond our representations is equal to the world we represent to ourselves, distinguishes modern philosophy from classical philosophy and arises from the claim that we know our representations and not the real. A twofold problem is formed: first, to demonstrate the existence of the world beyond our representations, and second, to demonstrate that that the knowledge we have constitutes precisely the knowledge of the world in which we live and is, in fact, actual knowledge, not chimer. Thus the problem of realism takes on an almost exclusively epistemological meaning. Nevertheless, contemporary realistic positions often confuse ontological and epistemological theses, which leads to internal contradictions. The same is true of the proponents of anti-realist views. The question of the causes of the anti-realistic tendency in the philosophy of science is raised and it is shown that the initial attitude of the modern science was realistic. It was undermined, on the one hand, by anti-realistic interpretations of the cognitive process (starting from Kant), on the other hand, by difficulties of theoretical order arisen in physics, and the main thing was that science began to deal with the unobservable, undermining the cognitive basis of radical empiricism. However, the new cognitive situation does not necessarily lead to anti-realism, another way of development relies on an understanding of the complexity and problematic relationship between theory and experience. A number of reasons in favor of scientific realism are concluded.
      38  1
  • Some of the metrics are blocked by your 
    Item type:Publication,
    Considerazioni sull'equilibrio da un punto di vista sistemico
    The notion of equilibrium is polysemic and its most general meaning is that of a state in which opposite forces mutually neutralize themselves. Its most satisfactory treatment can be attained by resorting to the conceptual and technical tools of general system theory such as they are applied, for instance, in physics, chemistry and biology. In this last science equilibrium receives the deeper meaning of homeostasis from which, by introducing the notion of information, one attains the domain of cybernetics and its related models. In such a way extensions of the notion of equilibrium can be obtained, e.g., to psychology, historiography, political theory, economics. In these domains equilibrium can be used in order to study dynamically the evolution of complex systems and this is precisely the reason for expressing it in terms of general system theory. ©2016, Vita e Pensiero.
      5  2