AMA Journal of Ethics

Dr Matthew Wynia joins us to discuss the importance and challenges of teaching Holocaust history to health professions students.

Sterilization requires physicians’ surgical skills. Forced sterilization requires many clinicians’ complicity.

Connections between racism and dehumanization have immediate, lethal, deleterious, longer-term consequences. Lessons from Nazi eugenics and human experimentation still apply.

One health professions school views the Holocaust as fundamental content knowledge in modern health care ethics, but teaching it is difficult.

The Nuremberg Code, the World Medical Association’s declarations of Geneva and Helsinki, and the Belmont Report share an origin in the Holocaust.

Lack of ethical, legal, and clinical consensus about best practice sometimes combines with a poor clinical evidence base.

Lobbying, maintaining diagnostic skill, participating in national societies, and contributing to robust discourse can influence practice and policy.

Death’s legal definition must be responsive to advances in technology, and it must delineate between life and death. Knowing where to draw the line is difficult.

For many physicians, lack of understanding about brain death leads to confusion and muddles interactions with patients’ loved ones at the end of life.

Criteria in statutes and tests used to diagnose brain death don’t always jibe, and this can undermine public trust in death pronouncements.