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.
Diagnostic utility of weight and body mass index is widely overestimated, and their use as health and wellness measures can be sources of iatrogenic harm.
AMA J Ethics. 2023;25(7):E540-544. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2023.540.
Historical perspective on how some sites and means of professional caregiving became high or low status helps us understand trends in poor care continuity in US health care.
AMA J Ethics. 2022;24(9):E822-829. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2022.822.
Clinicians have an ethical obligation to provide high-quality care to incarcerated and justice-involved patients, which means being knowledgeable and empathic about the challenges these patients face. This month, we explore patient, student, and clinician perspectives on correctional health care.
This month, AMA Journal of Ethics theme editor Marguerite Reid Schneider, a fourth-year medical student at University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, interviewed Srijan Sen, MD, PhD, about how mental health care and medical culture can be changed to benefit medical trainees.
Prison patients are never alone and never without supervision and rules, and the medical staff is always negotiating its power with the adminsitration. The patient-doctor relationship can become distorted in this setting.
Those in prison are less healthy than the general population, are far more likely to have engaged in high-risk behaviors that can result in organ damage, disease and disability, and age more rapidly than nonincarcerated individuals do.