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.
John Meyer joins Ethics Talk to discuss how “human-centered” design can help remove barriers to care and forge solidarity between patients and clinicians, and multidisciplinary artist Eve Payor talks about her projects with the Atlantic Center for the Arts and how soundscape ecology can help us understand effective sound design in health care settings.
Madison L. Esposito and Michelle Kahn-John, PhD, RN
Most clinicians receive little training in integrating Native healing into allopathic practice, which undermines patients’ autonomy and cultural values.
AMA J Ethics. 2020;22(10):E837-844. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2020.837.
Bias toward allopathic medicine in the research funding and publication of study results makes it difficult for physicians and others to find accurate data about the efficacy of non-Western, nonallopathic treatments.
Katrina A. Bramstedt, PhD and Francis L. Delmonico, MD
Transplant centers cannot regulate how people establish relationships, but when a donor-recipient pair comes together through Internet solicitation, the center must assess the donor’s motivations carefully.
The relationship between conventional and alternative medicine is wary at best. What is needed is expanded medicine, which encompasses the best that both kinds of medicine have to offer.
Alternative medicine practitioners may offer a more informative and satisfying relationship to patients, and the anecdotal support for alternative treatments’ rationales may have emotional appeal, but quack medicines cost money and cause harm. What really matters is whether a treatment can stand up to scientific testing.