Professionalism

Artificial Intelligence for Providers: A Risk Management Perspective

The rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into medicine presents both immense opportunities and significant challenges for the healthcare providers and other practitioners. While AI holds promise for improving patient safety, reducing costs, and enhancing experiences for both patients and…

Fires in the Operating Room

Although fires in the OR are a rare occurrence, the risk for fire is increased due to the oxygen-enriched environment. In the event of a fire, knowing how to respond and quickly manage the situation is necessary to protect patients…

Why Should Clinicians Care About Infectious Disease Existential Hazards?

Of all infectious disease events, pandemics could result in significant human depopulation in this Anthropocene epoch or even in the next few centuries. Existential factors that exacerbate pandemic risk include global warming, overpopulation, habitat loss, permafrost thawing, geopolitical conflict, and…

Why and How Should Physicians Mitigate Threats of Nuclear War?

Most physicians do not see, or learn to see, nuclear war threat mitigation as within the scope of their professional duties. This commentary on a case argues there are 2 reasons why physicians, in particular, should draw on their unique…

Why Should Extinction Medicine Be a Specialty?

This commentary on a case builds on recent literature on climate change, health, and human extinction to argue in favor of a new clinical specialty: extinction medicine. If based on precise application of scientific findings about species extinction, disaster prevention…

Medicine, Futures, and the Prevention of Human Extinction

This article draws a parallel between ethical reasons why people alive today have obligations to members of future generations and ethical reasons why physicians have obligations, besides helping improve patients’ quality of life, to help some patients confront their own…

How Might Health Care Think About the Ethics of Human Extinction?

Is there an important ethical difference between a global catastrophe that causes human extinction and one that does not? This commentary on a case introduces 3 approachesóequivalence, further-loss, and pro-extinctionistóin responding to this question. In particular, focus is placed on…

Ethics Talk: Why Health Care Still Matters in the Face of Humanity’s End

This activity is comprised of five multiple-choice questions based on the content of an AMA Journal of Ethics podcast about nuclear proliferation and planetary health. The featured guests are Joseph Hodgkin, MD, an attending hospitalist physician at Massachusetts General Hospital…

Ethics Talk: Ethical and Clinical Complexities of SDOH Screening and Follow-up

This activity is comprised of five multiple-choice questions based on the content of an AMA Journal of Ethics podcast about screening children for structural drivers of health. The featured guests are Laura Gottlieb, MD, MPH, a professor of Family Community…