Health care expositions combine professional networking with education, product demonstrations, and displays that celebrate and glamorize rescue-based priorities of the US health sector. These trade shows draw prominently on narratives of clinician heroes who “save” lives aided by complex technologies. Spectacle adds to the drama and is conveyed with industrial-scale heft and fervor to influence health care organizations—often via the clinicians who attend these expos—to purchase and integrate branded technology into their health service delivery settings. Vendors pay substantially for exposition space, where they motivate short- and long-term brand familiarity and recollection, scan attendees badges, and use “free” entertainment (eg, gambling, cocktail parties, costumery, live music, celebrity motivational speakers); pampering (eg massage, make-up, hairstyling); and gifts (eg, swag, food, alcohol) as preamble to their deployment of customer relationship management systems (CRMs). CRMs are designed to support follow-up on these companies’ expectations of attendee reciprocity. That is, long after an expo, vendors track and surveil attendees, in hopes that their expo investments will return lucrative purchasing agreements.
For some, however, the extreme spectacle of health care trade shows raises ethical and practical questions about how expos reify the goals of a profit- oriented, commercially driven health system at the expense of public health and health justice, which are not priorities of the US health sector that tend to be expressed at elaborate, costly expositions. This theme issue investigates how patients’ and communities’ health interests appear in health care trade show transactions and considers alternative models of innovation, discovery, and peer networking that center illness and injury prevention, health justice, health outcomes, and organizational purchasing practices that are evidence-based and promote quality health service delivery to patients and the public.
Manuscripts submitted for peer review consideration and inclusion in this April 2027 issue must follow Instructions for Authors and be submitted by 30 May 2026.
The AMA Journal of Ethics® invites original, English-language contributions for peer review consideration on the upcoming themes.