AMA Journal of Ethics^®

Some patients’ stories can be hard to tell and hard to listen to, especially in pressured, time-pinched clinical environments.

In 2010, artist Shengxun Lin created Hold Me, a cast resin replica of her own hand as a comfort object and stress reliever. This work continues that practical design theme with a focus on how use and comfort augment aesthetics.

This painting depicts a solitary physician after hours in an empty hospital lobby and is a tribute to such spaces in health care.

In isolation, we are physically apart; in solidarity, we are together. The COVID-19 pandemic emphasizes our social responsibility to maintain physical distance from one another. In doing so, we solidify our collective strength.

Clinicians have duties to express regard for the breadth and depth of their influence on patients’ pre- and postsurgical self-understandings.

One recent essay suggests that emphasis on social justice in medical education is done at the expense of clinicians’ technical competency. This is a response to that stance.

A patient’s story represents an ethical dilemma of cancer screening: it can save lives but generates diagnostic morbidity and incurs costs.

A fearless child inspires compassion, particularly regarding our clinical, political, and ethical orientation to ongoing practices of separating children from parents at the US southern border.

Two photographs of caregivers walking through a Honduran jungle to visit patients in their homes literally and figuratively represent barriers to health care access.

Multiple pieces of reclaimed pallet wood are sculpted into a lateral cerebrum and a gradient of burned wood visually represents a crisis among health care professionals.