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.
Heather J. Logghe, MD, Tyler Rouse, MD, Alec Beekley, MD, and Rajesh Aggarwal, MD, PhD
Modern surgeons are diverse, socially adept, and differ in other important ways from the stereotype of a technically gifted white male with poor bedside manner.
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(5):492-500. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2018.20.5.mhst1-1805.
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.
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 pauses the transplant community has taken, at various times throughout the history of transplantation, to make sure that transplantation was truly a boon to patients represent genuine ethical engagement.
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.