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Phenomenological approaches to medicine – PhenoMed, for short – have introduced traditional phenomenology in philosophy of medicine and have grown quite popular. In this paper, I ask what philosophical role phenomenology is given in PhenoMed. Indeed, a survey of the field leaves one with a puzzling inflation of goals: phenomenology is both argued to be useful for analysing the concepts of health and illness, providing a definition of health and disease, describing illness experiences, and humanizing medicine. I review these goals – which depends on the authors, although some are pursued simultaneously by the same authors – with a focus on two goals: the analysis of health concepts and the description of subjective experiences. I argue that these goals are unlikely to be compatible with phenomenological endeavours. For this purpose, this paper is both critical and historical. I start by reviewing how analysis is usually understood in traditional phenomenology and how different it is from other types of analysis (for instance, conceptual analysis). I first argue that S.K. Toombs (1987) and F. Svenaeus (2001), two proponents of PhenoMed, misrepresent phenomenological analysis and give poor reasons to think their version is useful for the definition or analysis of health and disease. I then argue that it is controversial whether phenomenology's purpose may be understood as the study of subjective experiences (as H. Carel (2016) has argued). I notably argue that phenomenology's fundamental transcendental nature, which may not be simply brushed away, makes it unfit for the study of the ordinary every day and subjective experiences.
