Dr Esha Bansal joins Ethics Talk to discuss her article, coauthored with Drs Saran Kunaprayoon and Linda P. Zhang: “Opportunities for Global Health Diplomacy in Transnational Robotic Telesurgery.”
The neurodiversity movement challenges us to rethink autism through the lens of human diversity, valuing diversity in neurobiologic development as we would value it in gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation.
In treating children with autism, physicians should focus on involving parents in a shared decision making partnership and seeking safe, evidence-based, and medically and cost-effective treatments.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(4):310-317. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.4.ecas3-1504.
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.
Evaluation of an autism curriculum for pediatric residents yielded significant short-term gains in residents’ objective and self-assessed knowledge of autism spectrum disorder diagnosis and treatment.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(4):318-322. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.4.medu1-1504.
Minors, including those with autism, have the right in certain states to make decisions about their own medical care provided they meet certain criteria. Even in cases in which the “mature minor exception” does not apply, physicians should actively engage patients in discussion of their treatment.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(4):305-309. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.4.ecas2-1504.
The harms of communicating autism risk can be avoided by helping families to understand risk and to distinguish between poor and good sources of scientific information, which should take families’ interests into account.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(4):323-327. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.4.nlit1-1504.
This month, AMA Journal of Ethics theme editor Nikhil A. Patel, MS, a fourth-year medical student at the Mayo Medical School, interviewed Joia Mukherjee, MD, MPH, about Partners In Health’s mission to strengthen low-income countries’ health care systems and lessons learned from the Ebola crisis.
Because many complementary and alternative medicine therapies for autism are based on misguided notions of its cause and lack support from scientifically sound studies, physicians should steer parents away from these practices and toward safe, effective, and evidence-based interventions.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(4):375-380. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.4.sect2-1504