AMA Journal of Ethics

This acrylic painting draws on Picasso’s 1907 Head of the Medical Student to consider intimacy and its ethical demands.

Clinicians can practice disability humility by developing social understandings of disability.

Overly physicalist approaches to caring for patients are not likely to help them.

Patients writing daily journal briefs about work-related activities and pain can help clinicians help them.

Public and self-stigma negatively influence patients’ quality of life, employment, and housing opportunities.

Some clinicians cite absence of long-term data to justify not fully deferring surgery for children with DSD, and legal restrictions of early procedures are also at play.

A patient can appear healthy, but her joint pain and fatigue is diagnosable by a clinician listening closely enough to take her seriously.

Defining typical appearance as a goal of health service provision is harmful and unnecessary for traits that are stigmatized but neither harmful nor distressing.

Hyperfocus on measurability can result in evidentiary overreliance and undervaluation of patients’ experience narratives.

Adhering too strictly to biomedical thinking about diagnosis can prevent clinicians from empathically engaging with patients and helping them navigate their illness experiences.