This article describes an educational initiative in which clinical ethics students, who were either in a bioethics master’s degree program or in the fourth year of medical school, spent two days observing health care in an urban jail. Students submitted…
As the field of hospital medicine celebrates its twenty-first anniversary, we believe it is time to expand its mission to play an even greater role in medical education. Given hospitalists’ proximity to students and clinical material, members of this growing…
A wave of medical student activism is shining a spotlight on medical educators’ sometimes maladroit handling of racial categories in teaching about health disparities. Coinciding with recent critiques, primarily by social scientists, regarding the imprecise and inappropriate use of race…
Medicine has a conceptual contribution to make to the immigration debate. Our nation has been unable to move forward with meaningful immigration reform because many citizens seem to assume that immigrants are in the United States to access benefits to…
In this paper, we examine the limits of informed consent with particular focus on ways in which various factors can overwhelm decision-making capacity. We introduce overwhelm as a phenomenon commonly experienced by patients in clinical settings and distinguish between emotional…
This commentary argues that financial incentives for employees who meet body mass index requirements reinforce healthism, a false and oppressive ideology. Healthism is the view that personal health is the vehicle of well-being and that health is achieved by taking…
The process of being granted asylum is complex, often taking months and years. Asylum seekers face high risk of being denied asylum in the United States. As medical and psychological evaluations assist in achieving successful asylum outcomes, human rights asylum…
Physicians are ethically bound to respond to undocumented, underinsured, and uninsured patients’ health needs, even those demanding complex, expensive interventions, such as organ transplantation. A social medicine skill set of structural competency, allyship, accompaniment, and activism is required to best…
Latinx individuals represent a linguistically and racially diverse, growing US patient population. Raciolinguistics considers intersections of language and race, prioritizes lived experiences of non English speakers, and can help clinicians more deftly conceptualize heterogeneity and complexity in Latinx health experiences….
During the COVID-19 pandemic, clinician policy makers have faced unprecedented challenges. This commentary responds to a fictional case of a clinician policy maker who heads the Office of the Surgeon General and must ponder the answers to these questions: (1)…
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