Until the mid-20th century, birth in the United States for Latinx Indigenous peoples was an ancestral ceremony guided by midwives and traditional healers.
AMA J Ethics. 2022;24(4):E326-332. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2022.326.
One patient’s experience of life-encompassing iatrogenic harm from being institutionalized emphasizes Italy’s comparative success, relative to the United States, in recovering from decades of deinstitutionalization policy.
AMA J Ethics. 2022;24(8):E795-803. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2022.795.
How society and medicine discussed and responded to child abuse changed dramatically in 1962. Since that time, the problem’s fuller scope has been revealed.
AMA J Ethics. 2023;25(2):E148-152. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2023.148.
Kelsey Mumford, Lin Fraser, EdD, and Gail Knudson, MD, MEd
While transgender health care has moved beyond “gender identity disorder” and “gender dysphoria” as mental illnesses, gender incongruence continues to be a source of oppression.
AMA J Ethics. 2023;25(6):E446-451. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2023.446.
In the past, forced sterilizations violated the autonomy of vulnerable women. Today, measures intended to protect such women from the abuses of the past may in fact hamper their autonomy in a different way.
The belief persists that patient satisfaction surveys are more responsive to friendliness and expensive facilities than clinician interaction, but there is evidence to the contrary.
Movements to deinstitutionalize people with mental illness and to make institutionalization more legally difficult have resulted in a lack of space and resources for the care of those with severe mental illness, and many have ended up in jails and prisons.
Learn about the development of the systems for delivery and reimbursement of health care in the U.S. from the unregulated free-market state in 1908 to the complex, highly managed state in which it exists in 2008.