“I don’t think anybody, as a doctor or patient, wants to go to the doctor and say ‘Doctor, I have some specific signs and symptoms’ and the doctor to say ‘well, sir, you’re suffering from a socially constructed condition and we need to change society, not treat the individual.'” Dr. Metzl delivers the keynote at the Humanities Futures Capstone Conference at Duke University’s Franklin Humanities Institute. #medicine #race #racism

In the hours and days following the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, politicians and many media outlets reflexively described the shooter, Stephen Paddock, as a solitary madman who planned and carried out the mass killing without apparent connection to any larger network, group or ideology. President Trump, who is quick to label other global acts of mass violence as “radical Islamic terrorism” well before investigations establish such intentions, described the horr

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] We define structural competency as the trained ability to discern how a host of issues defined clinically as symptoms, attitudes, or diseases (e.g., depression, hypertension, obesity, smoking, medication “non-compliance,” trauma, psychosis) also represent the downstream implications of a number of upstream decisions about such matters as health care and food delivery systems, zoning laws, urban and rural infrastructures, medicalization, or