Panel question

Who decides what counts as disease

Kind
Policy and health systems

Prompt

Who should decide what counts as a disease? For example, should aging, shyness or baldness ever be treated as medical conditions?

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After you practice: what this question tests and how to approach it

What this question tests

  • Critical thinking
  • Ethical reasoning
  • Health systems and advocacy

How to approach this question

This panel interview question tests whether you can reason about where ordinary human variation ends and a medical problem begins, and who gets a say in drawing that line. Keep your answer on the ethics and the stakes of labeling, which need no clinical detail. Name the groups with an interest: the people living with the condition, physicians, researchers, insurers, businesses that sell products for the condition, and society at large. Weigh what a label can give, such as access to care, insurance coverage and validation, against what it can cost, such as stigma, unnecessary treatment and companies expanding a category for profit. Use aging, shyness or baldness to show how your view might change with how much a condition limits a person's life. End with a clear position on who should decide and what safeguards should shape that decision.

All 9 questions on this topic

Mock interviews

If you want to practice with a person, we run mock MMI and panel interviews with feedback on every answer.