AMA Journal of Ethics

Community Mental Health Centers’ Roles in Depolicing Medicine

America faces widespread gun violence and police brutality against Black citizens and persons with severe mental illness (SMI). Violence perpetrated against unarmed patients is common in health care, and evidence-based safety measures are needed to acknowledge and eradicate clinical violence….

An Abolitionist Approach to Antiracist Medical Education

Medical education is limited to the biomedical model, omitting critical discourse about racism, the harm it causes minoritized patients, and medicine’s foundation and complicity in perpetuating racism. Against a backdrop of historical resistance from medical education leadership, medical students’ advocacy…

Ethics Talk: Why Should Clinicians Care About Nutrition?

When patients look for strategies to improve their overall health, diet and nutrition are often a logical place to start after all, what we consume has enormous impact on our susceptibility to disease and disability. But health care professionals don’t…

Medicine’s Valuing of “Normal” Cognitive Ability

Functionalists describe the role of medicine as maintaining the “normal” functioning of individuals and society . Definitions of normal functioning, however, are subjective, determined by cultural and personal values. Medicine’s values and the resulting explanatory model of disease do, in…

What Does Ethics Demand of Health Care Practice in Conflict Zones?

Human rights violations in armed conflict against community members, displaced persons, and health workers include combatants’ uses of threats and coercion, attacks on health facilities, and abuses against civilians. Traditional clinical and public health ethical obligations are not sufficient to…

Traumatic Imagination in Traditional Stories of Gender-Based Violence

Traumatic imagination includes creative processes in which traumatic memories are transformed into narratives of suffering. This article emphasizes the importance of storytelling in victims’ mental health and offers a literary perspective on how some women’s experiences of suffering can be…

Everyone Is Harmed When Clinicians Aren’t Prepared

War and conflict are now common, lingering like an endemic disease in most countries of the Global South. Population displacement, infectious disease outbreaks, food and water shortages, damage to infrastructure, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress are among the phenomena to which…

Ethics Talk: Unblinding COVID-19 Vaccine Trials

In this video edition of Ethics Talk, journal editor in chief, Dr Audiey Kao, talks with Dr Steven Goodman about the ethical and scientific implications of unblinding COVID-19 vaccine trials.