2023 George W. Gay Lecture in Medical Ethics: The Ethical Conundrum of Medicalizing Self-control

Medical schools, the physicians they graduate, and public health officials are appropriately concerned with human behaviors that affect risk of morbidity and mortality. Unfortunately, to a great extent, medical education and medical practice remain mired in folk psychological rather than scientific understandings of decision-making and self-control. Thus, views of people suffering from such conditions as drug addiction, obesity, and conditions that impair executive function often lurch between the extremes of moral opprobrium and fatalistic biological determinism. Failure to engage wisely with our advancing, albeit still incomplete scientific understanding of behavioral control is not only damaging to public health, but represents an ethical failure on the part of medical educators and practitioners that contribute to distress and poor outcomes for patients.

The 2023 lecturer was Steven E. Hyman, MD, a Core Institute Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research. He is also Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Harald McPike Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology.

Learn more about the George W. Gay Lecture: https://bioethics.hms.harvard.edu/eve...

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