New paper asks physicians to expand the scope of medical intervention
February 2022
A call to redefine the boundaries of medical intervention for vulnerable persons was issued in Annals of Family Medicine by UC Davis Center for Healthcare Policy and Research (CHPR) member Jennifer Karlin. In her essay, Karlin, assistant professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at UC Davis Health, shares her experiences treating hepatitis C for Sam, a former patient who also needed social support for narcotics addiction and insecure housing, and uses Sam’s story to bolster her call for medicine to include structures that support patients’ social needs.
Karlin describes how a flaw in the social safety net meant Sam was denied housing due to his treatment for addiction and contributed to his death. “Medical providers are given the authority to intervene in cases of life or death by providing direct medical services, but can do little about the majority of preventable deaths attributable to social determinants of health,” Karlin said. In her article, she calls “on primary care doctors to redefine the medical paradigm to remedy the disjointed logics of care that result in unnecessarily high financial and human costs.”
Read Karlin’s paper: “Sam’s Story: The Financial and Human Costs of Disjointed Logics of Care."