Intercultural Medical Disagreement: Ethics, Epistemology, Ontology

Medical beliefs and practices are intertwined with ontological beliefs and epistemological stances that can vary from person to person and culture to culture. This makes it hard to resolve medical disagreements, since it may be hard to establish a common ground from which to work towards resolution. This is particularly awkward when one or both sides believes that the views of the other side are harmful, yet when insisting on or enforcing an intervention implies overriding beliefs that may be deep and important - perhaps even so deep as to concern the nature of harm.

CPEMPH is developing a project to better understand how to resolve medical disagreements, focusing in particular on the case of disagreements between medical systems from different cultures, which can give rise to serious public health challenges.