{"title":"What Can Medicine Do for Poetry? Poetry in the First Year of the <i>CMAJ</i>.","authors":"Shane Neilson","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Much has been written about how poetry can be of use to medicine and medical education, privileging an instrumental perspective. But what might medicine contribute to poetry, beyond \"subject matter\"? Through enactive metaphors specific to medicine, medicine can bring body to words, and specific context to abstractions. But medicine and poetry are co-embroiled in life itself. This article first discusses the instrumentalism governing the use of poetry in medical education. Then it uses metaphor theory and the Kristevan concept of translationality to consider what medicine can do for poetry. Finally, the article considers the complex exchange between poetry and medicine in professional and educative contexts, illustrating these ideas through an examination of the uses of poetry in the first year of publication of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.</p>","PeriodicalId":54627,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives in Biology and Medicine","volume":"68 1","pages":"70-86"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143588284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Time We See: ADHD, Neuroqueer Temporality, and Graphic Medicine.","authors":"Prerna Tolani, Sathyaraj Venkatesan","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines the lived experiences of ADHDers with respect to time perception, through the lens of a neuroqueer temporality framework and its representation in graphic medicine. By close-reading autobiographical comics digitally posted by Pina Varnel (ADHD Alien), Dani Donovan, Heidi Burton, and Cecil, the article studies key elements of ADHD time perception, including time blindness, the now/not now dichotomy, the waiting mode, and the state of hyperfocus. ADHDers' perception of time is nonlinear and present-oriented, diverging from neuronormative temporal expectations. In visualizing the nuanced differences in temporal perception and their impact on ADHD self, the article contributes to the discussion of diverse ways of perceiving and interacting with the world. By recognizing these differences, the article aligns with the neurodiversity paradigm and calls for understanding ADHD as a way of being, breaking the vicious cycle of moral judgments and assumptions of intentionality on the basis of invisible but legitimate differences in temporal perception.</p>","PeriodicalId":54627,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives in Biology and Medicine","volume":"68 1","pages":"117-138"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143588270","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ethics at the Hinge: health-care organizations and family caregivers during discharge planning.","authors":"Nancy Berlinger, Alison Reiheld","doi":"10.1353/pbm.2025.a962022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.2025.a962022","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay explores ethical challenges that frequently arise during discharge planning in acute-care and post-acute settings, often involving older adults with continuing care needs, with attention to organizational duties concerning family caregivers. Drawing on bioethics scholarship, empirical data, and their personal experiences and observations, the authors analyze a common set of burdens that a health-care organization will expect to hand off to a family caregiver as part of the discharge process. These burdens are co-produced by a patient's illness, clinical decision-making processes, the limits of public and private health insurers, and collective failures of imagination concerning how the care needs of aging societies can be met more fairly. The essay aims to be of practical use to professionals involved in discharge planning, in health-care ethics, or in executive-level decisions about organizational investments benefiting communities. It includes a set of recommendations premised on caregiver support as an ethical principle for health-care organizations.</p>","PeriodicalId":54627,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives in Biology and Medicine","volume":"68 2","pages":"255-270"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144250902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jenna Wright, Ellie Tumbuan, Marjorie Stamper-Kurn, Marshall H Chin
{"title":"Organizational Accountability for Justice and Health Equity.","authors":"Jenna Wright, Ellie Tumbuan, Marjorie Stamper-Kurn, Marshall H Chin","doi":"10.1353/pbm.2025.a962019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.2025.a962019","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Health-care organizations traditionally view accountability through punitive and performance-metric lenses, failing to address their responsibility to communities most impacted by health inequities. While research exists on organizational accountability in health care, little explores how Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) frameworks might transform health-care delivery toward justice and equity. This article examines how four BIPOC philosophical frameworks-right relations, Seven Generations, calling in versus calling out, and Emergent Strategy-can reimagine organizational accountability to advance health equity. The authors' findings reveal that combining BIPOC accountability frameworks with structural reforms in payment and care delivery systems enables health-care organizations to center relationship-building and long-term community impact. Concrete organizational examples demonstrate successful implementation of these principles through initiatives like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Advancing Health Equity program, while personal narratives illustrate their transformative potential in patient care. This work provides practical pathways for health-care organizations to move beyond punishment toward accountability models that prioritize immediate holistic care needs, health equity, and generational community well-being, fostering healing and justice.</p>","PeriodicalId":54627,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives in Biology and Medicine","volume":"68 2","pages":"209-228"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144250907","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Emily Berkman, Douglas Diekema, Mithya Lewis-Newby
{"title":"Organizational Ethics and a Regional Health-Care Network: navigating surges and shortages in pediatrics.","authors":"Emily Berkman, Douglas Diekema, Mithya Lewis-Newby","doi":"10.1353/pbm.2025.a962027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.2025.a962027","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Washington state's plans for a public health response to a pandemic or natural disaster were largely untested prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Individual institutions were unprepared for a crisis of the scale and severity of the pandemic, and they faced a myriad of ethical questions that required expertise and experience. The pandemic also revealed the fundamental need for local, state, and regional collaboration during times of resource scarcity. As individual institutions scrambled to organize and implement strategies for dealing with scarcity in a way that was both effective and fair, the lack of a regional or national system to organize those efforts impaired a timely response and resulted in duplicated efforts and differing approaches. This article describes the authors' pediatric institutional response to the pandemic within the context of a broader cooperative statewide approach. The authors explain the rationale for starting with a utilitarian framework and the ways in which its shortcomings were addressed. The structures and approaches described continue to be utilized and modified for other situations that lead to resource scarcity of all kinds. Although changes at the national level to create a national response would be ideal, collaboration and investment at the state and regional level is both critical and pragmatic in ensuring that all patients can access the health care they need.</p>","PeriodicalId":54627,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives in Biology and Medicine","volume":"68 2","pages":"326-336"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144250908","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Getting from \"Just Us\" to Justice: individual initiatives need organizational support.","authors":"David N Sontag","doi":"10.1353/pbm.2025.a962018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.2025.a962018","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>As health-care systems increase in complexity, how do they ensure ethical practices, with a specific focus on addressing persistent health disparities and advancing justice? This essay contemplates the role of a system-level ethics committee in supporting organizational efforts toward justice, drawing on the author's experiences leading ethics efforts at Beth Israel Medical Deaconess Medical Center and now developing a system-level ethics committee for the broader Beth Israel Lahey Health system. Although the author's experiences largely demonstrate the rich potential for a grassroots, bottom-up approach centered around individual employee initiative to create a justice-oriented organizational ethic, there is also a benefit to top-down support from the organization's leadership to formalize and articulate the mission and values that should drive the actions of the organization and its individual employees. Arguing that neither a bottom-up nor top-down approach is independently sufficient, the essay suggests a combined approach to further the organization's mission and, in particular, health-care justice. Insights from this analysis are translated into five recommendations for the role and contributions of a system-level ethics committee to ethics- and justice-oriented practice within a complex health system.</p>","PeriodicalId":54627,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives in Biology and Medicine","volume":"68 2","pages":"194-208"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144250904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Erika Blacksher, Jonathan M Marron, Basel Tarab, Julius Yang
{"title":"Participatory Practice in Pursuit of Social Justice.","authors":"Erika Blacksher, Jonathan M Marron, Basel Tarab, Julius Yang","doi":"10.1353/pbm.2025.a962017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.2025.a962017","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The idea that people should have a voice in decisions that affect them is now widely accepted in the US health sector. Practices such as patient and family advisory boards, community-based participatory research, patient-centered research, and public deliberation are becoming commonplace. The appeal of public participation turns on a number of purported benefits, including the potential for more inclusive and transparent decision-making, equitable interventions and outcomes, and public trust in institutions. Considerable conceptual work has refined definitions and frameworks of participatory processes, and ample experimentation is underway. Yet participation remains an ambiguous concept and highly variable in practice. Drawing on the authors' collective experiences in life and work, this article clarifies what participatory processes are, describes how they might support varied goals of justice, and identifies opportunities and considerations for their use in health-care organizations. Although participatory processes alone cannot solve the erosion of trust in American health care or remedy marked US health inequities, they can be an important tool for health-care leaders who wish to work toward building fairer health systems, services, and outcomes.</p>","PeriodicalId":54627,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives in Biology and Medicine","volume":"68 2","pages":"174-193"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144250909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The \"Young Birth-Helpers\": Obstetrical Education at the Chicago Maternity Center, 1934-1971.","authors":"Raymond H Curry","doi":"10.1353/pbm.2025.a968849","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.2025.a968849","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The Chicago Maternity Center provided obstetrical services for the medically underserved on Chicago's Near West Side for nearly eight decades (1895-1974). While its founder's vision, its outreach to underserved communities, the reasons for its decline, and the perceived abandonment of the community when it closed have been well documented, less attention has been paid to the role of trainees in providing obstetrical care. Medical students and residents routinely delivered babies in patients' homes, often without adequate supervision. This aspect of the center's history can help illustrate the evolution of experiential education in clinical medicine, along with emerging concepts of equitable access and quality of care. This work explores the center's role in medical education in light of contemporary perceptions of some participants-trainees, faculty, and institutional leadership-and through analysis of scholarly and popular publications, institutional archives, and communications with alumni and retired faculty. The popularity of the experience with trainees and its constituents, segregation of the center's activities from those of the sponsoring medical center, and its well-respected history led to the persistence of a model for clinical medical education that was an anachronistic remnant of earlier approaches to education and to care for the poor and disenfranchised.</p>","PeriodicalId":54627,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives in Biology and Medicine","volume":"68 3","pages":"427-443"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145014489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Anti-Social US Health-Care System: A Case for Socially Oriented Reform.","authors":"Aimee Milliken, Olaf Dammann","doi":"10.1353/pbm.2025.a968850","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.2025.a968850","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the US, there has historically been strong public opposition to health-care reform involving \"socialized medicine.\" This resistance, at least in part, is influenced by a deeply entrenched individualistic ethos. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that the current US health-care system is broken, and that existing systems around the world achieve better outcomes while costing less. This article argues that learning from these systems should be possible. The authors describe roadblocks to health-care reform in the US, including social fragmentation, resistance to global models, and the prioritization of profit over well-being; argue that a value system that prioritizes the individual over the collective precludes successful health-care reform; highlight shortcomings of the US model; and propose that reimagining health care through a socially oriented lens, emphasizing collective and reciprocal moral obligations, may offer a path forward.</p>","PeriodicalId":54627,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives in Biology and Medicine","volume":"68 3","pages":"444-452"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145014496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Margin, Mission, and the Sociology of Profession: a conversation.","authors":"Frederic W Hafferty, Lauren Taylor","doi":"10.1353/pbm.2025.a962026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.2025.a962026","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Hospitals and health systems have become prime movers in US health care, employing more than 77% of the physician workforce and growing in scale through persistent market consolidation (Muoio 2024). These entities' business practices have recently come under sharp scrutiny for appearing to run contrary to some of the more idealistic norms of medicine. While the law is a valuable tool in discouraging and punishing bad organizational behavior, it frequently struggles to keep pace with a changing marketplace. What ethical concepts, if any, can provide a check or constraint on their behavior? Sociologist Fred Hafferty, one of the leading scholars of professionalism in medicine, explores these and other questions in conversation with ethicist and management scholar Lauren Taylor.</p>","PeriodicalId":54627,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives in Biology and Medicine","volume":"68 2","pages":"314-325"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144250906","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}