The call for structural competency encourages medicine to broaden its approach to matters of race and culture so that it might better address both individual-level doctor and patient characteristics and institutional factors.

Conflicts between federal and state laws governing marijuana, lack of evidence about its efficacy as a treatment, and physicians' inability to predict or control dosage would all be aided by reclassification of the drug that would let clinical research go forward.

For more than 50 years, medicine has known of its responsibility to educate the public and decision makers about the medical consequences of nuclear war, but the profession has become complacent about the danger.

Physicians have a responsibility to identify broad contributors to poor health and advocate for changes that would alleviate them.

Like the critics of Dr. King’s anti-Vietnam War fight, some think physicians should stick to medical matters when advocating publically.

The Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program has trained 1,200 physicians over 45 years to be agents of change in their communities, medical education, research, and politics.

The Medical Committee for Human Rights left its mark on American history and provided a model for organizations that succeeded it, like Physicians for Human Rights and Physicians for a National Health Program.

Physicians will have a greater impact on health if they advocate for changes needed to prevent illness and harm than if they simply patch up those who are sick or harmed.

Invoking one’s medical training when presenting an opinion on a topic about which one has no expertise is simply cloaking personal one’s views in the mantle of respectability that being a doctor provides.

Should hospitals allow medical students, physicians, and staff to wear buttons about political issues on their uniforms?