What is the Problem with Medicine?- About 1 in 5 Canadians are currently disabled and most non-disabled people become disabled if they live long enough.
- As medical students, for many of us, our education about disability began before our medical training, with what we see in the media, how the people around us talk about disability, or even people we know with disabilities.
- Whatever view of disability society showed us, medical training focuses solely on clinical manifestations and lacks a social or societal perspective of various disabilities.
- This means many clinicians may graduate not only misunderstanding disability, but could have harmful biases that could perpetuate inequities and negative health outcomes among disabled patients, with larger societal consequences.
What Are We Doing About it?
With the help from disability advocates from across the country, we have written and published an interactive E-book to teach medical students what they need to know about disability in medical education.
Chapter 1: Helps us understand the role of doctors who have come before us
- Teaching us about the horrible history of the treatment of disabled people by the Canadian healthcare system (ex: institutionalization, sterilization and research without consent….).
Chapter 2: How language shapes how we think about disability
- Teaches us the harmful origins from doctors of some language to describe disability and how society has affected how you think about disability.
Chapter 3: Current day healthcare considerations
- More thoughtful ways to show up to conversations surrounding quality of life, consent, and screening when caring for patients.
