Integrating Public Health and Social Justice Teaching in Law, Medicine, and Bioethics

A major challenge to integrating social justice is the conflict between clinical ethics and public health ethics. There is a sharp dichotomy between individual health versus population health; autonomy versus social justice; and libertarianism versus utilitarianism. We present a framework and examples where Public Health and social justice can be successfully integrated into bioethics, and medicine. Bioethics is primed to integrate public health by framing the understanding of illness by its social determinants and the social, occupational, and national inequalities in health. In both our medical school and graduate school courses, we use a public health framework to explore bioethical concepts e.g. health disparities, health equity, and cardiovascular disease risk. Such an approach has a natural affinity with the principle of social justice in bioethics. In the near future, bioethics may come from behind the closed doors of the medical clinic and into the community and public domain where Public Health Ethics and the Ethics of Collaboration could become new areas of study. Please note this abstract is intended to be part of a panel with Kayhan Parsi, Nanette Elster and Katherine Wasson as moderator.