AMA Journal of Ethics^®

Traditional models of medical education in the US do not teach students to problematize segregation where they train and help care for patients. 

Clinical needs of patients with disabilities are seen with the “medical gaze,” a depersonalized lens of evidence-based medicine and of presumed objectivity.

One expression of structural injustice in the United States is delivery of health care according to patients’ race and insurance status.

“Very important persons” care contributes to multitiered, racially segregated health service delivery streams that influence clinicians’ conceptions of what patients deserve from them.

Motivating health equity requires taking deliberate steps toward desegregating health care, especially in academic health centers.

This article considers 1990s and 2000s-era civil rights complaints in NYC and offers legal strategies for scaling health outcomes improvement nationwide.

This comic shares a true story of a physician’s fraught interaction with and physical examination of a patient.

Increased awareness of conscious and unconscious biases and structural drivers of health can increase the likelihood of upstander interventions.

Unchallenged supra-geographic segregation perpetuates racial medical mythology, exacerbates myopia in health professions practice and education, and perpetuates injustice.

Training in a segregated health care system means that health professions students and trainees learn bias and experience helplessness and burnout.