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.
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