This research proposes a model linking healing and justice in therapeutic practice, suggesting clinicians serve as advocates for dignity and suffering.
This paper integrates insights from clinical narrative essays with frameworks from liberation medicine, critical medical anthropology, and restorative justice theory to propose a unified model of healing as justice. Drawing upon Paul Farmer's concept of accompaniment [1,2], Nancy Scheper-Hughes's embodied witnessing [3], and legal theories of dignity and repair [4], this study positions the physician as moral witness, narrative interpreter, and advocate for healing justice. Enhanced with insights from shame-based healing paradigms [5], Catholic social thought [6], ontological theories of suffering and healing [7], and anti-psychiatry critiques [8-10], this framework bridges personal therapeutic presence with structural analysis, offering a vision of medicine that recognizes the therapeutic encounter as a site where dignity is restored, suffering is witnessed, and justice is enacted through sacred attentiveness.
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Julian Ungar-Sargon (2025) studied this question.