Given the well-established correlation across cultures between poverty and unhealthy lifestyles, can it be just to hold individuals responsible for choices typical of their socioeconomic sector? Aren’t patient-responsibility programs simply conspiracies to shrink benefits to the poor?
The clinician/healer must both address the disease and seek to know how the medical condition is being experienced by the patient—what impact it has on his or her life and spirit.
A major contributor to the lack of medicines in developing countries is an intellectual property regime that allows proprietary drug companies with intellectual property monopolies to charge high prices and maximize profit.
A firm believer in professional responsibility, Furnell was in deep water from the first day he took over as sanitary commissioner of Madras and its 30 million inhabitants in May 1880.
Undocumented patients in the United States with end-stage renal disease receive “compassionate” dialysis. Such patients oscillate between being marginally well and “ill enough” to receive dialysis while clinicians wrestle with complicity in a system that both offers and withholds life-saving therapy.
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(8):E778-779. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2018.778.
Giving undocumented immigrants and those with DACA status (DREAMers) access to health care and medical education enables them to contribute to these systems.
AMA J Ethics. 2017;19(3):221-233. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2017.19.3.peer1-1703.