public health

Is Public Health and the First Amendment At Odds with Each Other

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An interesting article appears in the vol. 2 and 3. edition of the American Journal of Law and Medicine in 2013 titled “The First Amendment and Public Health, at Odds,” by Seth Mermin and Samantha Graff. The article talks about how the interpretation of freedom of speech in the First Amendment has, in recent years, been altered to benefit corporations. Usually when one thinks of the First Amendment they think of protecting individual’s rights to express their opinions and thoughts. The authors essentially state that with recent changes in the interpretation of the law now companies can push products without much regard to their effect on the health of their customers. The authors state “There has been nothing comparable to an uproar over the Supreme Court’s granting…in the infamous Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission. It is time – well … Read more

Health Care Should Not Be Framed in the Personal Responsibility Narrative

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I read an interesting article by Micah L. Berman titled “From Health Care Reform to Public Health Reform” appearing in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics (Fall 2011, pages 328-338). In the article Micah L. Berman discusses how the Affordable Care Act contains an “individualist/biomedical paradigm” which includes a number of provisions and programs which focus on public health but are in fact misaligned and at odds with public health research. He does this by first (A) arguing that in America there is a large cultural emphasis on personal responsibility which is shaped by powerful political, social, and psychological forces and second (B) that influential industries profit at the expense of public health. A) Micah states: “This paradigm focuses on what can be done by or to individual patients, and it leads to policies that seek to either (a) … Read more