Sets the ethical limits of student participation in patient care when the students are part of foreign medical teams.

identifies the pitfalls of improperly organized international medical student electives and the hazards of volunteering for the wrong reasons.

Students who take international electives must be sensitive to the impact of their presence and to possible risks to patients' safety and their own, and must ask whether their motives for going abroad are overly self-serving.

A physician points to AMA policy to argue that necessary medical, public health, and financial support can be developed for the treatment of obesity even if it is not formally classified as a disease.

Advice for enrolling patients in clinical trials.

Global health training offered through UCSF’s EMPOWUR program prepares ob/gyn residents to work in under-resourced communities locally as well as globally.

Stressful life experience associated with racial and ethnic discrimination can have detrimental effects on the coronary and cardiovascular health of people in historically marginalized groups.

Doctors and hospitals must stop being bystanders to food-related illness and begin to become role models and educators in the transition to healthful eating habits, just as they did in tobacco cessation.

Until healthful food is widely affordable and accessible to all people, any discussions of how policy might infringe on the right to choose may be misguided.

If wealth screening and patient care must be mixed, they would be safer and more effective if guided by a policy developed with input from physicians.