Standardized patients: Uniform medical treatment

Is the drive for political correctness overriding individual needs and keeping doctors from delivering the best care?

By Susan J. Landers, AMNews staff. April 16, 2001.

Should the quest for social justice be part of the public health agenda? How about welfare reform? Increased wages? Many in the public health field favor a broad agenda, and their interest in advancing it has historic roots.

Ever since physicians and others began to concern themselves with public health in the 19th century, they have battled social conditions that they considered part of the problem -- crowded, unsanitary housing and factories, and the need for clean food and water.

Public policy has often overlapped with public health, and current concerns with AIDS, breast cancer, smoking and asthma continue the tradition. Science has ostensibly served as a rein on ideological extremes on both the right and left.

But somehow, the challenges now at stake seem to raise difficult and complex questions and trigger controversial responses. Today, for instance, some public health advocates see other social conditions they would like to overcome -- poverty, racism and sexism, to name a few. But how far should physicians go in combating these social maladies?

Should physicians and other public health professionals be in the vanguard of the fight to raise wages? Or would they better serve the public by continuing to administer evidence-based medicine to defeat diseases immediately at hand?

Mohammad Akhter, MD, executive director of the American Public Health Assn., argues that there is no clear line between appropriate and inappropriate public health agenda items.

"In the public health community there is a very strong belief that if some of us are unhealthy, the rest of us cannot be healthy," says Dr. Akhter. [...]