When Upholding Patient Autonomy Undermines Evidence-Based Medicine: Disability, Health Equity, and the Goals of Medicine

About this event

Clinicians aware of the large body of research reporting that people with disabilities, including significant disabilities, report similar levels of quality of life as those without disability are faced with a particular challenge when recently disabled patients request withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment. This challenge is further exacerbated by data suggesting that many, if not most disabled patients experience worse health outcomes due to socially modifiable factors both in and outside of the clinic, as the NIH recently recognized by formally designating disabled people as a health disparity population. This talk will explore that tension through a case discussion of requests for withdrawal of LST after high spinal cord injury.

Speaker: Joel Michael Reynolds, PhD

Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor of Philosophy & Disability Studies, Georgetown University; Research Scholar, Kennedy Institute of Ethics; Faculty, Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics | Department of Family Medicine, Georgetown University School of Medicine & Medical Center

Presented by the Disability Studies Initiative, sponsored by the NEH Integrational Health Humanities and Allied Sciences (IH²AS) Lab.