A medical team’s unprofessional reactions to the birth of a baby with ambiguous genitalia reflects their discomfort with variations in sex characteristics and sets a poor example for medical students.
It’s important to offer medical students enough experience with homeless and estranged patient populations to foster their sense of self-efficacy and development of positive attitudes.
The federal requirement for providing emergency medical care to those who cannot pay has been unsuccessful in eliminating refusal of care and the practice of “patient dumping.”
This case illustrates how emergency physicians find themselves with an empty toolbox and must compromise to meet their responsibilities to patients and themselves.
Specific contributions to a scientific article entitle the contributor to be included as an author; requests for authorship by those who have not made those specific contributions are unethical.
Pairing medical students with chronically ill community volunteers for 2 years helps those students gain appreciation for the experience of illness, develop self-reflection and perspective-taking, and learn to communicate with people who may be quite unlike them.