It is often argued that medical practice pays insufficient attention to the facts of people’s embodiment. Phenomenologists such as Drew Leder, for instance, argue that traditional forms of physical examination which require the patient to adop a ‘corpse-like pose, flat, passive, naked, and mute’[1] fail to take adequate account of people’s first-person embodied perspective by focusing on disease and not the illness experience. In a similar vein, S Kay Toombs argues that whereas ‘the physician sees the patient’s illness as a typical example of disease, the patient attends to the illness for its own sake’[2]

The complaint that we take insufficient account of people’s embodiment isn’t limited to the clinical interaction. The claim that embodiment hasn’t been taken seriously is also directed at health and welfare policy. Mark Flear, for example, argues that one of the reasons the harms caused by metal-on-metal hip implants and pelvic mesh implants have taken so long to come to official attention is due to the marginalisation of embodied experiences and first-person reports of pain within healthcare policy and the on-the-ground workings of the health care system. [3]

The purpose of this paper is to consider the thesis that we need to pay greater attention to people’s embodiment. In other words, the goal is to consider both the arguments for why we ought to take people’s embodiment seriously, and what taking people’s embodiment seriously should look like in medical practice, health policy, and welfare policy.

The paper is structured as follows. Section II argues that, although some instances of medical practice may fail to pay attention to people’s embodiment, this constitutes poor medical practice. Drawing on Pellegrino’s account of the purpose of medicine, I argue that taking people’s embodiment seriously is required to achieve the internal goal of medicine; namely healing.

Section III moves on to examining the claim that both health and welfare policy have failed to pay sufficient regard to people’s first-person embodied perspective. The paper looks at the results of the Cumberlege review, and criticisms of the Work Capability Assessments and Personal Independence Payments Assessments to argue that embodiment has, indeed, been side-lined in public policy.

Section IV develops two challenges to taking embodiment seriously in health and welfare policy. The first is that there is an enormous amount of variation in how people are embodied. As a consequence, there is a strong possibility that adjusting policy to benefit particular individuals based on an appreciation of their embodied experiences could be detrimental towards other individuals.

The second challenge is based on the idea that we can’t simply take people’s first person reports of their embodied experiences at face value. In a public policy context, claims need to be scrutinised to ensure that decisions fair, non-arbitrary, and based on serious deliberation about the facts of the matter. This is especially true when the outcome of a policy decision is the distribution of non-trivial benefits (such as state funding). The challenge is finding ways to ensure that people’s testimony is checked for reliability without this causing epistemic injustice.

Finally, in section V, the paper suggests that both of these challenges can be overcome by adopting a just procedural approach to taking embodiment seriously before briefly considering some proposals for doing so.