The Philosophy of Health Sciences is an interdisciplinary field that explores the conceptual, epistemological, and ethical foundations of medicine and healthcare. Several key readings provide a strong foundation for understanding these issues. Trisha Greenhalgh’s How to Read a Paper: The Basics of Evidence-Based Medicine and Healthcare offers both practical and philosophical insights into the nature of medical evidence, while Jeremy Howick’s The Philosophy of Evidence-Based Medicine critically examines the epistemological underpinnings of medical research. For a deeper discussion on the nature of health, Christopher Boorse’s seminal paper Health as a Theoretical Concept (1977) provides a biological perspective, while Lennart Nordenfelt’s On the Nature of Health: An Action-Theoretic Approach presents a holistic view that incorporates well-being and functionality. Havi Carel’s Phenomenology of Illness explores the lived experience of disease, contributing to a growing discourse on patient-centered perspectives in healthcare. Additionally, Alex Broadbent’s Philosophy of Medicine and Miriam Solomon’s Making Medical Knowledge delve into the construction and validation of medical knowledge. Ethical and philosophical dilemmas in clinical practice are discussed in Georgina Hawley’s Ethics in Clinical Practice: An Interprofessional Approach, while K. S. Shrader-Frechette’s Risk and Rationality: Philosophical Foundations for Population Health tackles the intersection of ethics, public health, and policy-making. For a broader philosophical context, Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What? provides an insightful discussion on the ways diseases and medical categories are socially constructed. These readings collectively provide a comprehensive foundation for exploring the philosophical dimensions of health sciences, from epistemology to ethics and the lived experience of illness.

I recommend this paper:

Albuquerque, A., & Tanure, C. (2023). Healthcare bioethics: a new proposal of ethics for clinical practice. History and Philosophy of Medicine, 5(2), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.53388/hpm2023010

It is a short, but very interesting take on bioethics, focused on patients' rights and shared decision making.