Racial essentialism the belief that socially constructed racial categories reflect “inherent” biological differences exacerbates learners’ racial prejudice and diminishes their empathy. Essentialism hinders health professions education programs’ capacity to generate a health care work force that motivates ethics and equity…
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….
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…
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…
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 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…
This article outlines the history of international humanitarian law vis-à-vis conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) from the promulgation of the Lieber Code in 1863 until the adoption in 2019 of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2467. This article considers how a…
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…
Under-resourced and fragmented public health infrastructure has contributed to a poor pandemic response in the United States. There have been calls to redesign the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and to increase its budget. Lawmakers also have introduced bills…
This commentary on a case examines racially inequitable outcomes, especially for Black patients, resulting from use of Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) scores to triage patients during the COVID-19 pandemic and how inequitable outcomes in triage protocols could be reduced….
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