In the medical field, despite the considerable progress of therapeutic techniques, the experience of the lived body, as felt from the inside, is still little known. In terms of diagnosis, the micro-phenomenological methods would allow the physician to acquire a detailed knowledge of the feelings of the patient at the different stages of his or her disease. This would enable an improved assessment of the therapeutic efficiency of the treatments, based not only on the symptom inventory or a questionnaire, but on a deep understanding of the transformation of the patient's lived experience.
By helping the patient him- or herself to become aware of early and usually silent phases of the disease or its acute episode, these methods also open the way for non-pharmacological alternative therapies, of which a pioneering example is the non-pharmacological therapies of epilepsy. Such therapeutic methods, based on the improvement of body awareness, could be developed for other pathologies in order to facilitate their prevention, detection and therapy. They could be particularly useful in the control of addictions, the management of chronic pain and generalized anxiety disorder, and the treatment of depression, which is according to the World Health Organization the leading cause of disability worldwide.