Our health is largely determined by our social environments and that includes our physical environments. Our health is directly impacted by the location of oil and gas facilities, the amount of plastics and carcinogens in our drinking water and the air we breathe, and the number of yearly natural disasters. Furthermore, not all people are equally affected by these environmental factors. People of color, those with low incomes, the young and the old, and those with chronic illness are affected more by unhealthy environments. In this presentation, I discuss these realities of environmental injustice by demonstrating the clinical and ethical implications of our unhealthy environments. I discuss the ethical decisions about health equity and class and racial disparities in health that environmental injustices forces us to make and how they affect the number of clinical interventions available to remedy our poor health.
Learning Objectives: After this webinar, attendees will be able to:
-Discuss the effects of unhealthy environments on our health
-Define environmental injustice
-Discuss the ethical choices about our health we must make given the status of our environment’s health
-Discuss the connection between clinical decisions and our health
-Explore samples of environmental injustice
Speaker: Keisha Ray, PhD, received her PhD in philosophy from the University of Utah. She is currently a tenured Associate Professor and holds the John P. McGovern, MD Professorship of Oslerian Medicine at the McGovern Center for Humanities & Ethics at UT Health Houston, where she also serves as the Director of the Medical Humanities Scholarly Concentration. Most of Dr. Ray’s work focuses on the effects of institutional racism on Black people’s health, highlighting Black people’s own stories, and the sociopolitical implications of biomedical enhancement. Her work uniquely prioritizes linguistic justice as a matter of access and commitment to public scholarship. Dr. Ray serves as an associate editor for the American Journal of Bioethics and its online site, “Bioethics Today” as well as Senior Associate Editor for the Journal of Medical Humanities. Dr. Ray has also been elected as a Hastings Center Fellow. She has contributed to top clinical, bioethics, and medical humanities journals. And based on her expertise, Dr. Ray is frequently called upon as a bioethics expert for popular news sources. Lastly, Dr. Ray is the author of the book “Black Health: The Social, Political, and Cultural Determinants of Black People’s Health” with Oxford University Press.
Event start time: 12:00 pm
Event end time: 01:00 pm