Today’s international health interventions—like colonial treatment campaigns—can be well-intentioned and still oppress and harm people they try to serve. Grasp of imperial medical history is critical for helping global health professionals understand the contexts in which they practice.
AMA J Ethics. 2016;18(7):743-753. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2016.18.7.mhst1-1607.
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.
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.
The causes of many health behaviors are deeply rooted in our culture, and using a counseling model that assumes individual control and responsibility for these behaviors can cause patients to feel hectored instead of helped.
Physicians, scientists, and public health officials are routinely on the defensive, refuting allegations of unconfirmed risks, justifying the value of vaccines, and striving to preserve public trust in vaccination overall.
The successive editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) have not responded to changing American sexual practices and mores, instead pathologizing sexual behavior that its authors considered to be atypical and conflating innocuous behavior and harmful treatment of other people in its diagnostic categories.
Those charged by the ACA health reform act to identify best clinical practices that are evidence-based and applicable across diverse populations can learn much from the experience of the Medicare-funded End Stage Renal Disease Program.