Not all cultural traditions have the same conception of personhood. In Confucianism, self-individuation takes place only through engagement with others in the context of one’s social roles and relationships.
The history of Western medicine chronicles a tension between ideologies of patient care—the holistic Hippocratic view and the specialization view, with a depersonalization of the patient that coincides with the rise of pathologic anatomy in the early modern era.
Dichotomies, such as reconstructive vs aesthetic surgery and medical vs cosmetic dermatology, can distort meanings of surgical procedures. This can compromise the value of procedures themselves and practices for their reimbursement.
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(12):E1188-1194. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2018.1188.
Jonathan Alhalel, Nicolás Francone, Sharon Post, Catherine A. O’Brian, PhD, and Melissa A. Simon, MD, MPH
Underrepresentation of individuals with limited English proficiency who speak Spanish is ongoing in phase 3 biomedical clinical trials and exacerbates health inequity.
AMA J Ethics. 2022;24(4):E319-325. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2022.319.
On this episode of Ethics Talk, Zahra H. Khan, Yoshiko Iwai, and Dr Sayantani DasGupta outline how “abolition medicine” can motivate critical responses to medicine’s expressions of hyper-punitive, deeply racialized exercises of state authority.
Aminta Kouyate joins Ethics Talk to discuss her article, coauthored with Drs Nhi Tran and Monica U. Hahn: “Why Professionalism Demands Abolition of Carceral Approaches to Patients’ Nonadherence Behaviors.”