The American Medical Association’s Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative, and Concepts has been published. It answers a number of unasked questions.
The guide condemns several “dominant narratives” in medicine. One is the “narrative of individualism,” and its misbegotten corollary, the notion that health is a personal responsibility. A more “equitable narrative,” the guide instructs, would “expose the political roots underlying apparently ‘natural’ economic arrangements, such as property rights, market conditions, gentrification, oligopolies, and low wage rates.”
They have suggestions. They are not yet mandatory. One the AMA recommends is “equity explicit” language. Instead of “individuals,” doctors should say “survivors”; instead of “marginalized communities,” they should say, “groups that are struggling against economic marginalization.” We must also be clear that “people are not vulnerable, they are made vulnerable.” Accordingly, we should replace the statement, “Low-income people have the highest level of coronary artery disease,” with “People underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements, among others, have the highest level of coronary artery disease.” te medical record will presumably be longer but more accurate.
They have suggestions. They are not yet mandatory. One the AMA recommends is “equity explicit” language. Instead of “individuals,” doctors should say “survivors”; instead of “marginalized communities,” they should say, “groups that are struggling against economic marginalization.” We must also be clear that “people are not vulnerable, they are made vulnerable.” Accordingly, we should replace the statement, “Low-income people have the highest level of coronary artery disease,” with “People underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements, among others, have the highest level of coronary artery disease.” te medical record will presumably be longer but more accurate.
This kind of propaganda, advancing a social/economic view at the expense of any logic or self-consciousness, will be met with caution only. No one will arise to challenge this; no one will want to appear on the right side of an unarguably lopsided argument. Stranger, how does an opinion like this emerge to speak for a medical population that certainly is overwhelmingly opposed to it?
No comments:
Post a Comment