The American Medical Association named alcoholism and addiction as illnesses during the 20th century. Obesity, smoking, and motor vehicle safety were also named as public health issues and targeted in poster advertising campaigns.
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(12):E1201-1211. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2018.1201.
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.
Gerald M. Oppenheimer, PhD, MPH and Ronald Bayer, PhD
The alarm generated by the AIDS epidemic left civil liberties proponents fearful that traditional public health responses might be imposed on newly susceptible or infected populations.
This third era of opioids ruining thousands of US lives follows a first era of iatrogenic addiction stemming from the Harrison Act of 1914, and a second was marked by changes in pain treatment attitudes between 1950 and 1970.
AMA J Ethics. 2020;22(8):E729-734. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2020.729.
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.
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.
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.