The traumatic stress experienced by our black healthcare colleagues is often overlooked. This work contextualizes workplace racism, identifies some interpersonal barriers limiting anti-racist growth, and calls for solidarity.

Ideas of racial genetic determinism, though unsupported by scientific evidence and atavistic, are common and readily apparent in American medical education. These theories of biologic essentialism have documented negative effects in learners, including increased measures of racial prejudice.

Truth telling to persons living with dementia is a nuanced problem that demands negotiating between the hazards of principlism and the loving deceiver’s demand to lie as needed. To ban deception, as we do restraints, would be misguided and cruel. So too to demand we always tell the truth. We ought to adopt a practice called “creative care.” It begins with the premise that person’s living with dementia are capable of creativity. Creative care breaks down the mysterious fourth wall we build around persons living with dementia, especially persons with advanced dementia. It invites us to see a person living with dementia as a person who is capable of creating something beautiful. They need our time and words, not our lies and sedatives.

Employers and governments are interested in the use of serological (antibody) testing to allow people to return to work before there is a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2. We articulate the preconditions needed for the implementation of antibody testing, including the role of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.

Cultural values influence how people understand illness and dying, and impact their responses to diagnosis and treatment, yet end-of-life care is rooted in white, middle class values. Faith, hope, and belief in God’s healing power are central to most African Americans, yet life-preserving care is considered “aggressive” by the healthcare system, and families are pressured to cease it.

Neuroimaging research regularly yields “incidental findings”: observations of potential clinical significance in healthy volunteers or patients, but which are unrelated to the purpose or variables of the study.

While human rights law has evolved to provide guidance to governments in realizing human rights in public health emergencies, the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the foundations of human rights in global health governance. Public health responses to the pandemic have undermined international human rights obligations to realize (1) the rights to health and life, (2) human rights that underlie public health, and (3) international assistance and cooperation. As governments prepare for revisions of global health law, new opportunities are presented to harmonize global health law and human rights law, strengthening rights-based governance to respond to future threats.

Over-the-counter (OTC) drugs are ubiquitous in the US. Policymakers have long debated how to modernize the system for making determinations of safety and effectiveness and addressing safety issues with OTC drugs.

Programs, policies, and technologies — particularly those concerned with health equity — are often designed with justice envisioned as the end goal. These policies or interventions, however, frequently fail to recognize how the beneficiaries have historically embodied the cumulative effects of marginalization, which undermines the effectiveness of the intended justice. These well-meaning attempts at justice are bounded by greater socio-historical constraints. Bounded justice suggests that it is impossible to attend to fairness, entitlement, and equity when the basic social and physical infrastructures underlying them have been eroded by racism and other historically entrenched isms. Using the case of Brazil’s National Health Policy for the Black Population, this paper proposes that bounded justice can contribute to justice discourses by serving as a concept, a proffering to a multi-disciplinary conceptual framework, and a potential analytic for those interested in the design of policy, technology, and programmatic interventions towards health equity.

U.S. immigration policies and enforcement can make immigrants fearful of accessing healthcare. Although current immigration policies restrict enforcement in “sensitive locations” including healthcare facilities, there are reports of enforcement actions in such settings.

This paper argues that the trends in advertising and corporatization in dentistry since the 1970s have resulted in processes of de-professionalization and de-regulation, respectively.

Just as tariffs lead to economic distortions and provide incentives for corruption, so do patent monopolies on prescription drugs, except the impact is often an order of magnitude larger.

Escalating demands for limited food supplies at America’s food banks and pantries during the COVID-19 pandemic have raised ethical concerns underlying “first-come, first-served” distributions strategies. A series of model ethical principles are designed to guide ethical allocations of these resources to assure greater access among persons facing food insecurity.

There has been growing consensus to develop relevant guidance to improve the ethical review of global health policy and systems research (HPSR) and address the current absence of formal ethics guidance.

Based on hierarchical classification and logistic regression of early US and French COVID-19 clinical trials we show that despite the registration of a large number of trials, only a minority had characteristics usually associated with providing robust and relevant evidence.