WHY ETHICS MATTER

Most people in healthcare are being asked to make high-stakes decisions inside systems that reward speed, compliance, and plausible deniability, not depth, dignity, or care. Clinicians are documenting more, trusting confusing tools, and carrying ethical strain that too often gets mislabeled as a personal resilience problem.

My work is about making those pressures visible and helping people respond with more clarity, integrity, and usefulness. Because ethics is not just about what the code says. It’s about power, context, and what happens to actual human beings when policy, technology, and care collide.

My Ethics Code

I’ve adapted this framework for self-governance of my clinical practice, consulting, teaching, and public media work. It is meant to complement, not replace, formal codes like AAMFT Code of Ethics and institutional policies.

This code sits on three foundations:

  • The AAMFT Code of Ethics that I am beholden to as a licensed marriage and family therapist.

  • Core principles from Western bioethics: respect for autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice,

  • And a broader set of perspectives that ask harder questions about power, history, culture, and lived experience, including care ethics, feminist and Black bioethics, Indigenous and decolonial ethics.

I don’t just care about “doing no harm,” but also how relationships, systems, racism, colonization, technology, and policy shape who is harmed, who is heard, and who gets left out.