The claim describes a real tension in modern medicine: clinical practices often transform a suffering person (a subject) into a case, body, or data point (an object), even though ethically the patient should remain a subject throughout care.pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih+1
From person to case
Clinical medicine depends on objectifying moves: measuring vital signs, imaging organs, classifying symptoms, coding diagnoses, and standardizing treatments. These practices allow comparison, prediction, and intervention, but they also encourage staff to relate to “the heart failure in bed 4” rather than to a particular person with a disrupted life-world.pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih+2
The “medical gaze”
Foucault’s notion of the “medical gaze” captures how doctors are trained to filter a patient’s story through biomedical categories, highlighting signs of disease while backgrounding biography, values, and context. Under this gaze, knowledge and authority sit with the clinician, while the patient becomes primarily a body to be inspected, tested, and corrected—a paradigmatic subject–object reversal.wikipedia+2
Phenomenology of illness
Phenomenological work on illness emphasizes that disease is not just a faulty mechanism but a transformation of how a person exists in the world. When medicine focuses only on the objective body (what can be imaged, measured, or coded) and neglects the lived body (how illness feels and disrupts everyday agency), the patient’s subjectivity is sidelined and the person experiences being “done to” rather than “acting with.”uwe-repository.worktribe+2
Necessary vs harmful objectification
Some objectification is ethically necessary: without treating aspects of the body as an object of inquiry, clinicians could not diagnose or treat effectively. The problem arises when these technical objectifications are not balanced by dialogue, empathy, disclosure, and respect for autonomy, at which point the patient can be dehumanized or commodified.sciencedirect+1
The observer effect in care
Observers—clinicians, trainees, researchers—do change encounters: they can alter patient behavior, constrain what is spoken, and reinforce asymmetries of power. Ethical and humanizing practice tries to counter this by securing informed consent, foregrounding the patient’s narrative, and structurally embedding patient-centered behaviors so that the “observed” remains the primary subject of the encounter rather than its object.pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih+2
Editor:
As described by Quantum Theory : )
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In quantum theory, measurement inevitably changes what is measured, and that is a useful analogy for how the medical system changes a person into a “patient-object” when it turns its full observational apparatus on them.pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih+1
Quantum observer effect
In quantum mechanics, a system evolves in a fuzzy superposition of possibilities until a measurement “picks out” a definite outcome, with the act of measurement itself altering the system’s state. Experiments like the electron double-slit show that watching which path particles take forces them to behave like localized particles instead of delocalized waves; the stronger and more precise the observation, the more it destroys the prior interference pattern.sciencedaily+3
From quantum system to “patient”
By analogy, a person in everyday life has many open possibilities, identities, and meanings, but once inside the medical apparatus, the investigative process “collapses” them into a specific profile—diagnosis codes, risk scores, protocol slots—on which the system can act. The more intense and frequent the observing (monitoring devices, imaging, labs, assessments, charting), the more the person’s lived complexity is replaced by a tightly defined clinical object, similar to how increasing measurement precision in quantum experiments more strongly constrains the system’s behavior.sciencedirect+2
Subject, object, and measurement
The quantum measurement problem highlights a tension between a continuous underlying evolution and the discontinuous jump produced by observation; something about the observer–system interaction is not captured by the bare equations. In medicine, there is a parallel tension between the continuous, subjective experience of illness and the discontinuous categorizations imposed by tests and diagnoses, where the act of “looking medically” both reveals and creates the patient-as-object that the system then treats.backreaction.blogspot+3
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