Publications by authors named "Joel M Reynolds"
Article Synopsis
- The essay discusses the growing recognition of ableist attitudes in health care and the challenges in balancing reproductive autonomy with the rights of disabled individuals after the Dobbs decision.
- It focuses on the Louisiana Department of Health's emergency declaration that lists conditions categorizing unborn children as 'medically futile,' which raises significant ethical and medical concerns.
- The authors advocate for rescinding the declaration and emphasize the importance of integrating reproductive and disability justice in health care policies going forward.
Expanding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to Disability: Opportunities for Biological Psychiatry.
Biol Psychiatry Cogn Neurosci Neuroimaging
December 2022
Given its subject matter, biological psychiatry is uniquely poised to lead STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives related to disability. Drawing on literatures in science, philosophy, psychiatry, and disability studies, we outline how that leadership might be undertaken. We first review existing opportunities for the advancement of DEI in biological psychiatry around axes of gender and race.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- The COVID-19 pandemic sparked debates on how to allocate and possibly reallocate ventilators during healthcare crises.
- The authors emphasize that removing a patient's personal ventilator can severely violate their bodily and social integrity.
- They advocate for protecting personal ventilators in triage protocols, arguing that these devices should not be included in reallocation discussions.
Article Synopsis
- The paper critiques existing literature on disability and enhancement, arguing that it oversimplifies these concepts by not considering a broader range of cases and the complexities of transitioning between them.
- In section one, the authors present seven diverse examples of disability and enhancement, illustrating why they matter and how they are often overlooked in discussions.
- They conclude that current definitions fail to encompass all scenarios, noting that while strict welfarist perspectives on disability might cover more ground, they still lack a nuanced understanding of individual capacities and transitions.
Health for Whom? Bioethics and the Challenge of Justice for Genomic Medicine.
Hastings Cent Rep
May 2020
Article Synopsis
- The report emphasizes that justice is fundamental to medicine, urging bioethics to integrate justice into medical practice.
- It explores the dual nature of genomic knowledge, highlighting how it can provide beneficial insights into disease and ancestry while also imposing new obligations and societal classifications.
- The nine essays in the report particularly focus on the burdens of genomic knowledge, arguing that these burdens have historically hindered true progress towards justice in medicine.
In this essay, we suggest practical ways to shift the framing of crisis standards of care toward disability justice. We elaborate on the vision statement provided in the 2010 Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Medicine) "Summary of Guidance for Establishing Crisis Standards of Care for Use in Disaster Situations," which emphasizes fairness; equitable processes; community and provider engagement, education, and communication; and the rule of law. We argue that interpreting these elements through disability justice entails a commitment to both distributive and recognitive justice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- The paper highlights that biases related to group identity, especially concerning disability, lead to significant epistemic errors in the medical field that are often overlooked.
- It connects medical errors to social epistemology, emphasizing how biased epistemic schemas can harm marginalized patients, particularly those with disabilities.
- The authors identify four mechanisms—testimonial injustice, epistemic overconfidence, epistemic erasure, and epistemic derailing—that exacerbate these errors and argue for more comprehensive strategies to combat these injustices in healthcare.
The historical relationship between health care professionals and people with disabilities is fraught, a fact all the more troubling in light of the distinctive roles clinicians play in both establishing and responding to that which is considered normal or abnormal by society at large. Those who wish to improve their clinical practice might struggle, however, to keep up with developments across numerous disability communities as well as the ever-growing body of disability studies scholarship. To assist with this goal, I offer an overview of recent disability theory, outline a set of responsibilities clinicians have to disability communities, and provide recommendations for clinicians who hope to justly treat patients with disabilities and improve their care and health outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInsofar as many older adults fit some definition of disability, disability studies and gerontology would seem to have common interests and goals. However, there has been little discussion between these fields. The aim of this paper is to open up the insights of disability studies as well as philosophy of disability to discussions in gerontology.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- Edmund Pellegrino emphasized the need to rethink medicine's core concepts, like health and illness, due to challenges posed by the industrialized West's cultural climate.
- The concept of normality is critical in this discussion, particularly as scholars in disability studies highlight its ambiguous nature, especially in relation to Deafness and body integrity identity disorder (BIID).
- To enhance medical understanding and practice, both medical professionals and philosophers should prioritize ambiguity as a central concept, challenging the notion of universal medical truths and recognizing the influence of context and experience.
Article Synopsis
- Heidegger's concept of "Sorge" suggests that care is central to human existence, encompassing emotions like sorrow, worry, and the responsibility for others.
- The Hastings Center exemplifies genuine care through its scholars' commitment to various aspects of healthcare, including the well-being of humans and nonhumans alike.
- Bioethics, reflecting this ethos, can be understood as a form of care work, although it is complex and sometimes challenging to navigate.
Bioethics has an uneasy relationship with embodiment. Only with vigilance does knowledge of the body as it is lived counterbalance the momentous inertia of knowledge of the body as an object brought about by modern medical sciences. As a field tethered to detached, technical ways of knowing the world, bioethics must toil to treat the body as more than mere material and machine.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF