Today's medical students have an important role in ethical care for the dying because their role involves having conversations with patients about their experiences and values.
Despite leaps forward in medical technology that have enabled the timely detection and effective treatment of many cancers, members of marginalized racial and ethnic groups and patients without health insurance often do not receive timely and appropriate care.
Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD and Dorothy E. Roberts, JD
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.
Publicizing physician ordering information as a way of peer-pressuring hospital employees into cutting costs is likely to have unintended consequences.
When patient autonomy became a closely held value in medical ethics in the 1960s and '70s, the physician’s conscience-based right to refuse to deliver a given service began to be contested.
If employees of religious institutions whose consciences conflict with those of their employers were to be granted legal protection for positive claims of conscience, the religious freedom of institutions within which they work would be gravely compromised.