Joel T. Wu, JD, MPH, MA and Jennifer B. McCormick, PhD, MPP
False health-related speech can cause harm, but it’s not restricted unless it’s obscene. Physicians are obliged not only to correct patients’ false beliefs, but to engage digital spaces in which false claims thrive.
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(11):E1052-1058. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2018.1052.
Government can regulate false speech and professional speech, which bans “gag laws” and compelled speech about laws to restrict abortion, for example. How should health professions share regulatory responsibility with government to prevent true speech about health information from being stifled?
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(11):E1041-1048. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2018.1041.
On this episode of Ethics Talk, Zahra H. Khan, Yoshiko Iwai, and Dr Sayantani DasGupta outline how “abolition medicine” can motivate critical responses to medicine’s expressions of hyper-punitive, deeply racialized exercises of state authority.
Aminta Kouyate joins Ethics Talk to discuss her article, coauthored with Drs Nhi Tran and Monica U. Hahn: “Why Professionalism Demands Abolition of Carceral Approaches to Patients’ Nonadherence Behaviors.”
Russyan Mark Mabeza joins Ethics Talk to discuss his article, coauthored with Betial Asmerom, Dr Rupinder Legha, and Vanessa Nuñez: “An Abolitionist Approach to Antiracist Medical Education.”
Kristen N. Pallok and David A. Ansell’s “Should Clinicians Be Activists?” highlights how physician activists risk retaliation from “economically and socially” privileged physician leaders and organizational leadership who “have been trained to comply” with structural inequity.
AMA J Ethics. 2022;24(7):E694-696. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2022.694.