Medical school faculty have a nonnegotiable duty to report students whose professional behavior falls seriously short of the mark. If they refrain from fulfilling this duty for fear of retaliation, the antiharassment pendulum has truly swung too far.
Julie M.G. Rogers, PhD, C. Christopher Hook, MD, and Rachel D. Havyer, MD
The medical profession’s valuing of intellectual ability may inadvertently harm people with intellectual or cognitive disabilities who have a different notion of “the good life.”
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(8):717-726. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.8.peer1-1508.
This month Virtual Mentor theme issue editor Elizabeth Miranda, a medical student at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, interviewed Dr. Elliott Fisher about the problem of unwarranted variation in health care services.
It is the clerkship director's role to advise students labeled gunners when their behavior becomes a problem, but changes in the larger system might help to prevent this behavior from occurring in the first place.
Role-playing exercises, which help participants understand the experience of being harassed, can be helpful in addressing mistreatment in medical education.
The David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA formed the Gender and Power Abuse Committee in 1995 to address mistreatment of medical students, residents, and junior faculty.
The Association of American Medical Colleges has added and refined questions about mistreatment in medical education to its Graduation Questionnaire, increasing the amount and specificity of information about what kinds of incidents occur and how students feel about them.