Disability Justice and Anti-ableism for the Pediatric Clinician.

The impact of ableism on health care, and specifically the health of people with disabilities, is not only underrecognized, but misunderstood at a foundational level due to socially acceptable denial of anti-disability bias. For the pediatrician that seeks to learn about the value of anti-ableist approaches to health care and how it can promote child health, this article reviews the relationship between medical jargon and anti-disability bias, and provides a primer on disability justice, the medical versus social models of disability, and other scholarly concepts related to anti-ableism. The authors provide narrative examples of disability bias in clinical scenarios, and the article concludes with actionable recommendations on anti-ableist language etiquette and clinical best practices. Although ableism is a societal issue, pediatricians have a responsibility to recognize and address ableism as a threat to child health.

Exploring the intersection of critical disability studies, humanities and global health through a case study of scarf injuries in Bangladesh.

This article puts critical disability studies and global health into conversation around the phenomenon of scarf injury in Bangladesh. Scarf injury occurs when a woman wearing a long, traditional scarf called an orna rides in a recently introduced autorickshaw with a design flaw that allows the orna to become entangled in the vehicle's driveshaft. Caught in the engine, the orna pulls the woman's neck into hyperextension, causing a debilitating high cervical spinal cord injury and quadriplegia. The circumstances of the scarf injury reveal the need for more critical cultural analysis than the fields of global health and rehabilitation typically offer. First, the fatal design flaw of the vehicle reflects different norms of gender and dress in China, where the vehicle is manufactured, versus Bangladesh, where the vehicle is purchased at a low price and assembled on-site-a situation that calls transnational capitalist modes of production and exchange into question. Second, the experiences of women with scarf injuries entail many challenges beyond the injury itself: the transition to life with disability following the rehabilitation period is made more difficult by negative perceptions of disability, lack of resources and accessible infrastructure, and cultural norms of gender and class in Bangladesh. Our cross-disciplinary conversation about women with scarf injuries, involving critical disability studies, global health and rehabilitation experts, exposes the shortcomings of each of these fields but also illustrates the urgent need for deeper and more purposeful collaborations. We, therefore, argue that the developing subfield of global health humanities should include purposeful integration of a humanities-based critical disability studies methodology.

COVID-19 and the need for disability conscious medical education, training, and practice.

The COVID-19 era exposes what was already a crisis in the medical profession: structural racism, ageism, sexism, classism, and ableism resulting in healthcare disparities for Persons with Disabilities (PWD). Early research highlights these disparities, but we do not yet know the full impact of this pandemic on PWD. Over the last 20 years, many medical schools have attempted to develop disability competency trainings, but discrimination and inequities remain, resulting in a pervasive distrust of medicine by the disability community at large. In this commentary, we suggest that disability competency is insufficient because the healthcare disparities experienced by PWD are not simply a matter of individual biases, but structural and systemic factors requiring a culture shift in the healthcare professions. Recognizing that disability is a form of diversity that is experienced alongside other systemic disadvantages like social class, race, age, sex, gender identity, and geographic location, we explore the transformative potential of disability conscious medical education, training, and practice that draws on insights from intersectional disability justice activism. Disability conscious medicine is a novel approach, which improves upon competency programs by utilizing disability studies and the principles of disability justice to guide us in the critique of norms, traditions, and institutions to more fully promote the respect, beneficence, and justice that patients deserve.