Title : Redefining education about disability for medical pre-professionals
Abstract:
Pre-professionals believe studying the ethics of disability is not important and does not pertain to their future career in healthcare. Unfortunately, individuals fall into different fallacies of thinking when it pertains to people with physical disabilities: Fallacy of Authority and Fallacy of Pity. Thus, the purpose of this presentation is twofold:
1) To discuss the fallacies of reasoning and how this perpetuates discrimination towards people with physical disabilities.
2) To provide three educational solutions to improve pre-professional and medical professionals' perspectives on practical ethics.
Discrimination against people with physical disabilities exists in all realms of society. Michael Oliver, a prominent disability studies researcher, discussed the importance of being a person with a physical disability when researching and teaching disability studies. Furthermore, Oliver argued that able-bodied people do not think discrimination exists because they are not the individual with a physical disability. Abled-bodied individuals also often believe they know what is best for people with physical disabilities, even though they have no experience with the disability themselves. Moral reasoning literature discusses different fallacies of reasoning about ethical issues. Fox and DeMarco specifically discuss how these fallacies can have a negative effect on our reasoning. The fallacies of reasoning which usually affect pre-professionals in healthcare are the fallacy of authority and the fallacy of pity.
These reasoning fallacies result in prejudices which favors one’s thoughts over another resulting in discrimination toward the population. Different solutions are available. One such solution noted by Levinas is perspective taking, which helps to understand what it truly is like to be another. Furthermore, it allows one to critically think about how one is being treated and how one wants to be treated with dignity and respect. This presentation will offer examples of two other solutions as well as practical applications using all three in the education of pre-professionals and even professionals in the medical field.
