The AMA’s Historic Health Fraud and Alternative Medicine Collection includes images of quack devices from the early 20th century that generated oversight we now take for granted.
AMA J Ethics. 2021;23(9):E721-738. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2021.721.
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.
Jayant Menon, MD, MEng and Daniel J. Riskin, MD, MBA
The authors describe a historical pattern in which a set of enabling technologies facilitates rapid advances in medical practice, resulting in recognition of new ethical challenges and a decades-long struggle to resolve them.
The continuance of public and institutional support for medical research after the publicized deaths of human research participants in the 1950s contrasts sharply with the disciplining of institutions responsible for two such deaths in recent decades, which suggests that medical research participants are no longer receiving public recognition for their contributions to science.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(12):1166-1171. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.12.mhst1-1512.
Despite generations of opposition from organized medicine, chiropractors, unlike most other groups of professionals, maintained an identity distinct from the practice of medicine.
Although now discredited, the idea that mothers’ behavior is responsible for autism lives on in the social pressure that mothers feel to save their autistic children, at a cost to both the self-blaming parents and people with autism.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(4):353-358. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.4.mhst1-1504.
Diethylstilbestrol (DES) was widely used in the 1940s to 1960s to prevent pregnancy loss but was later found to be associated with adverse health effects in exposed offspring, underscoring the need for careful evaluation of new therapies.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(9):865-870. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.9.mhst1-1509.
During disasters and mass casualties, point-of-care ultrasound makes it possible to diagnose thoraco-abdominal injuries rapidly and accurately, offers a tool for procedure guidance, and has streamlined patient triage.
Primary materials including interviews with some of the volunteer subjects provide information on the experiments into the pathogenic mechanism of yellow fever.