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Drug Dealing And The Internal Morality Of Medicine, Matt Lamkin

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

Which practices qualify as “medical” in nature? This question has important legal implications. Every state has laws prohibiting the “unauthorized practice of medicine.” Health insurance policies generally limit coverage to procedures that are “medically necessary.” And physicians can be prosecuted as drug traffickers if they prescribe controlled substances without a “legitimate medical purpose.” Each of these questions—and many others—hinge on how medicine is defined.

As with many common terms, we all have a general understanding of what medicine is and this heuristic suffices to carry us through our daily lives without complication. Yet when called on to produce a precise …