Govind persad at the podium

When All You Have is a DALY, Everything Looks Like Disease

Recently the Petrie-Flom Center’s annual conference brought together medical experts, bioethics scholars, and disability advocates to rethink how medical systems and public health policies can engage with disability.

During the many fascinating panels at “Beyond Disadvantage: Disability, Law, and Bioethics” one idea that sparked some debate was whether we should use quality/disability adjusted life years (QALY/DALY) to set priorities for who gets access to healthcare resources. Prof. Govind Persad, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins and blogger for Bill of Health, suggested in his presentation that we should dramatically reduce the role of such utilitarian calculations in priority setting, instead focusing on the genesis of the disadvantage.

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State-Level Solutions to Discrimination in Organ Transplants 

By Emily Largent

organ transplant
Doctors in North Dakota perform a kidney transplant. (Photo by ndguard/Flickr)

In recent years, alleged instances of discrimination against people with disabilities in organ transplantation have captured public attention.

In 2012, for example, the parents of Amelia Rivera, a child with Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome, alleged that they were told their daughter was not a candidate for a kidney transplant because of her “mental retardation.” The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia denied “disqualify[ing] transplant patients on the basis of intellectual ability.” Nevertheless, more than 51,000 individuals signed a change.org petition demanding that the hospital “allow the life saving [sic] transplant four-year-old Amelia Rivera needs to survive.”  Ultimately, Rivera received a living donor kidney transplant from her mother.

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image of the conference hall

Beyond Disadvantage: Photos from the Petrie-Flom Annual Conference

At last week’s Petrie-Flom Center Annual Conference, “Beyond Disadvantage: Disability, Law, and Bioethics,” discussed a number of topics related to the “mere difference” vs. “bad difference” disability theory debate.

Over the course of the day, six panels of experts shared their research and views on topics ranging from health care as eugenics to epistemic injustice to organ donation.

We will have the videos of the event soon, but in the meantime, enjoy the tweets from #rethinkingdisability and some photos from throughout the day by photographer Martha Stewart.

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Medical Professionals with Disabilities Workforce and their Associated Challenges

By Paulchris Okpala

person wearing medical scrubs

Do the provisions of the 2008 Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act (ADAAA) address challenges faced by medical professionals with disabilities (MPD)?

A 2012 report on Americans with disabilities from the US Census Bureau suggests that it is highly unlikely. There is every reason to be alarmed by the increasing number of medical professionals with disabilities who leave their jobs, or express the intention to quit employment. There is also a rapidly decreasing number of MPD who express the desire to seek employment. Could this trend be attributed to the challenges faced by the MPD in the workplace?

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Dementia, Disability, and Advance Medical Directives

By Rebecca Dresser

pencil drawing of a brain Anyone fortunate enough to live beyond middle age faces a risk of developing dementia. Dementia is a widely feared disability. People often say they wouldn’t want to live if they developed the condition.  

Experts in law and ethics praise advance directives, or instructions to follow on behalf of patients, as a tool giving people control over the life-sustaining medical care they later receive as mentally impaired dementia patients. Some advance directive supporters also want the law to recognize advance requests to withhold ordinary food and water in the late stages of dementia. And some argue that the U.S. should follow the Netherlands in allowing doctors to give lethal drugs to people who made advance directives asking for assisted death if dementia makes them unable to live at home or to recognize their loved ones.  

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long staircase

Epistemic Injustice, Disability Stigma and Public Health Law

By Daniel Goldberg

Public health law can integrate medical and social understandings of disability in ways that promise to reduce disability stigma and enhance epistemic justice.

However, models of disability currently embedded in public health law do precisely the opposite, at least partly due to the fact that public health laws have historically assimilated medicalized models of disability.

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2018 Petrie-Flom Center Annual Conference: Beyond Disadvantage: Disability, Law, and Bioethics

2018 Petrie-Flom Center Annual Conference: Beyond Disadvantage: Disability, Law, and Bioethics
June 1, 2018 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East ABC (2036)
Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

“Congress acknowledged that society’s accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.” Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., School Bd. of Nassau, Fl. v. Arline, 480 U.S. 273 (1987).

The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School is pleased to announce plans for our 2018 annual conference, entitled: “Beyond Disadvantage: Disability, Law, and Bioethics.” This year’s conference is organized in collaboration with the Harvard Law School Project on Disability.

Conference Description

Historically and across societies people with disabilities have been stigmatized and excluded from social opportunities on a variety of culturally specific grounds. These justifications include assertions that people with disabilities are biologically defective, less than capable, costly, suffering, or fundamentally inappropriate for social inclusion. Rethinking the idea of disability so as to detach being disabled from inescapable disadvantage has been considered a key to twenty-first century reconstruction of how disablement is best understood.

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Making “Meaningful Access” Meaningful: Equitable Healthcare for Divisive Times

By Leslie Francis

Another anniversary of President Bush’s signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is coming up in late July, yet the nation remains far from offering even a semblance of equitable societal opportunity to most individuals with disabilities.

For them, full social participation is dismissed as merely an idealistic dream. With its focus on restoration of full functioning for patients, the health care delivery system might be supposed an exception, but a closer look shows the opposite is true.

Physicians’ offices, clinics, and hospitals too often have not been made accessible. Too frequently, these facilities have diagnostic or treatment equipment that some people, due to disability, cannot use. Health care provider staff are not trained to interact with or assess disabled individuals, and may be swayed by implicit biases that target disability, just as are non-medical personnel or laypersons in the population.

disability rights protest sign
Photo by The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights/Flickr

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