Clinicians’ responses to bloodied, unresponsive patients have been ubiquitously dramatized in medical shows. In clinicians’ real responses to high-stakes stressful situations, however, we do well to be wary when chaos is untamed by their competence, precision teamwork, evidence-based care planning, and patient-centered management. Clinicians are taught to incorporate and routinize what they do together every day, over and over again: health care professionalism has always been and is a practice. While shows glamorize dramatic and emotional stakes of health care situations, skilled clinicians generally strive to control any variables they can, restore homeostasis, and promote wellness in the lives of ill, injured patients. As a culture, we might not benefit when health care organizations are misappropriated and misrepresented as sites of dramatic entertainment. Patients, their loved ones, and their clinicians need health care organizations to be places of peace. This theme issue investigates what it means to establish and maintain health care as an enterprise known less for drama or stress and more for healing and peace.
We invite manuscripts for the November 2024 issue of the AMA Journal of Ethics® that canvass possible meanings of peace in health care and consider approaches that efficiently and equitably support peace ecology and peacemaking in health care. Wide ranging explorations of peace as a human right and growing public interest in altered states of consciousness, sensory deprivation, stimuli reduction, and other practices that promote experiences of peace that might involve kindred moral emotional experiences(eg, calm, rest, forgiveness, comfort, compassion, feeling heard, or feeling a deep sense of security) are also welcome.
Manuscript submission deadline has passed.
The AMA Journal of Ethics® invites original, English-language contributions for peer review consideration on the upcoming themes.