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.
Richard Zeckhauser, PhD and Benjamin Sommers, MD, PhD
While patient consumerism may cause inefficiencies that need to be managed appropriately, insofar as it leads to active patient participation it has the potential to improve medical decision making.
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.
When evaluating the developments and complications of a marginally viable premature infant, physicians and parents must work together to decide on treatment that is in the infant’s best interest.
Increased awareness and improvement in access are needed in order to alleviate the racial disparities that exist with regard to the underutilization of hospice care by African Americans and other ethnic populations.