Core Definitions
A Litigation Brief for Physiological Rights
How the claim is filed. Standing, justiciability, remedies, and the defenses to expect. Anchored on the two sample cases already developed (Ferritin 24, John, 68) and on the doctrinal ground of The Instruments Already Exist. A working document for jurists, to be adapted by counsel with the jurisdictional expertise the resource does not claim.
All Medicine Is Preventive
Physiological rights address what medicine will not prevent. Modern hospitals have specialized in the prevention of one particular outcome, the death that arrives tonight, and have left the prevention of every other outcome without a physician. A treatise on how the emergency ward's practice of last resort names, without saying so, the paradigm this resource defends, and on the extension of that practice to the decades that precede the emergency.
Why Physiological Rights Go Beyond the Right to Food
Physiological rights are irreducible to the right to food — many physiological parameters cannot be maintained or restored through diet alone.
The Care of Self as Ground of the Physiological Right
The right to physiological integrity does not rest on the love a person happens to feel for their own life. It rests on an older ground, laid down in the antique practice of the care of self, in Spinoza's conatus, in Jonas's responsibility to the vulnerable, and in Kant's rule that no person shall be treated as a mere means. A secular foundation for a right that must hold when affect fails.
Inadequacy of the Right to Health
The limits of the State's obligation of means — why the right to health as currently framed fails to guarantee individual physiological integrity.
Physiological Rights
The full set of essential physiological needs that must be actively met to enable a person to live fully — a concrete, measurable complement to the right to health.
Rights-Based Medicine vs Evidence-Based Medicine
Why 'there is no evidence' is not a scientific verdict but a discretionary refusal. The COVID demonstration of the fracture line, the funding loop that makes the demand for evidence self-fulfilling, and the two questions rights-based medicine hands back to those who invoke it.
Self-Medication as a Codified Right
Auto-soin, in its full sense, is not a fallback the medical system can refuse to acknowledge. It is codified in Alma-Ata, the WHO Self-Care Interventions programme, the doctrine of informed consent, and the international right to health. It is also the prerequisite of any coherent claim to physiological rights: a subject whose intervention on their own body cannot be legitimated cannot be the bearer of a right to have that body measured or restored.
The Instruments Already Exist
Physiological rights within the WHO Constitution, the ICESCR, and their General Comments. A legal reader's entry point. Two precedents of operationalisation from international health and humanitarian law: antiretrovirals for HIV and nutritional thresholds in emergency response. The doctrinal work required is not the invention of new rights but the extension of instruments that were written to be extended.