Rethinking Xenophobia and Medical Xenophobia

Abstract

With the increasing refugee population in our country, which has faced an intense wave of migration since 2011, xenophobia is increasing day by day. During the delivery of health services, the immorality of xenophobia, which grows usually by hiding behind the increasing average number of patients and unsolvable communication problems, was discussed from the perspective of the medical profession, which has ethical codes and deontology. First of all, the medical and social science literature on xenophobia, the current, historical and psychopathological background of this phenomenon, and its explicit or implicit relationship with medicine were investigated. The xenophobic attitudes and actions of physicians, who are the main actors of health care delivery all around the world, were evaluated from the perspective of medical ethics and history. In this article, the findings of the socioeconomic, political, and psychological foundations of xenophobia, its relationship and context with new racism theories, and the historical existence of medical xenophobia, which is discussed as a current phenomenon in health services, and especially in South Africa, and what it can cause today are tried to be revealed. The fact that xenophobia may arise against a vulnerable subject who is about to lose his self-respect in the society in a place and encounter, with where all kinds of identity and biographical information are of no importance except for medical reasons, not only puts all kinds of ethical contexts of the patient-physician and physician-physician relationship (confidentiality, secrecy, intimacy, mutual respect, professional solidarity, courtesy, etc.) at risk but also it turns the issue into a morality one. Medicine should be practiced by the physician in a neutral space where all kinds of knowledge and identity, except for illness, are ignored.