Defenses of affirmative action rely on faulty assumptions about the educational value of student-body diversity and the best ways to address educational inequities.
Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin continues the debate about affirmative action in higher education. What constitutes adequate representation of a given group, and should those groups be based on race or class?
Timothy Cavanaugh, MD, Ruben Hopwood, MDiv, PhD, and Cei Lambert, MFA
The informed consent model for gender-affirming medical treatment emphasizes patient autonomy in choosing care without involving mental health professionals.
AMA J Ethics. 2016;18(11):1147-1155. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2016.18.11.sect1-1611.
This month, AMA Journal of Ethics' theme editor Cameron Waldman, a second-year medical student at Albany Medical College, interviewed Aron Janssen, MD, about how healthcare professionals can better serve their transgender patients.
In the September 2014 issue on physicians as agents of social change, Dr. Audiey Kao, editor-in-chief of Virtual Mentor interviewed Dr. Rajiv Shah, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development or USAID.
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.
The revisions balance a growing understanding of gender identity disorders and societal views with the need to retain conditions that benefit from intervention and the removal of which would hamper patients’ ability to receive medical treatment.