ABSTRACT
In recent years, the digital health sector has experienced explosive growth. The excitement over this area of innovation is evident in numerous arenas, including The New York Times, which ran a special issue on 'The Digital Doctor' in October 2012. Terms like engagement, listening, empathy, experience and intimacy are now taking centre-stage in the media as well as in promotional materials for digital health startups. This chapter offers a preliminary treatment of the ways in which digital health engages with humanistic medicine. It shows how tech companies adopt the discourse of humanistic medicine, and considers how humanism became a concern within medical and health scholarship. The chapter addresses strategies that medicine has adopted to address the perceived distancing of providers from patients. It concludes with thoughts and reflections for ways in which humanistic discourse and approaches might be reflexively integrated into digital health in the interest of listening and responding to health experiences, as opposed to pathologizing and marginalizing patients.
