Health educators have duties to teach patient focus, motivate equity, and cultivate students’ capacity to serve our most vulnerable neighbors, wherever they reside.
AMA J Ethics. 2021;23(11):E858-863. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2021.858.
Thalia Arawi, PhD, Ghassan S. Abu-Sittah, MBChB, and Bashar Hassan
Decolonization of curricula in health professions is key to preparing clinicians to respond with care and competence to vulnerabilities and disease burden exacerbated by conflict.
AMA J Ethics. 2022;24(6):E489-494. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2022.489.
Physicians tend to rely on diagnostic criteria, including BMI, that can influence patients’ access to care, referrals, and insurance coverage for indicated interventions.
AMA J Ethics. 2023;25(7):E507-513. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2023.507.
Beyond consensus that pain is “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience,” its biology remains poorly understood, and options for its treatment remain frustratingly inadequate.
Hanni Stoklosa, MD, MPH, Aimee M. Grace, MD, MPH, and Nicole Littenberg, MD, MPH
Training for health care professionals on human trafficking should be informed by a human rights perspective and include prevention and identification of trafficking and treatment of trafficking-related health conditions.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(10):914-921. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.10.medu1-1510.
Reducing racial disparities in pain treatment requires an interdisciplinary approach to identifying causes of racial biases and teaching health care professionals to recognize and reduce them.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(3):221-228. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.3.medu1-1503.
Nalini Vadivelu, MD, Sukanya Mitra, MD, MAMS, and Roberta L. Hines, MD
Inadequate education of primary care clinicians leads to inadequately treated pain, which has myriad dire consequences. To address this problem, education about pain management should be made a mandatory part of medical school curricula.