The experience of an English professor dying of ovarian cancer in Margaret Edson’s play Wit shows that both literary and medical discourse obfuscate and objectify rather than promote communication of “simple human truths” that dignify life and death.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(9):858-864. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.9.imhl1-1509.
Instead of trying to reduce the number of people who have access to a patient's medical record by quarantining information, hospitals should explain the current meaning of confidentiality to patients as part of the informed consent process.
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 Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program has trained 1,200 physicians over 45 years to be agents of change in their communities, medical education, research, and politics.
Rebecca Lunstroth, JD, MA and Eugene Boisaubin, MD
Task-based small-group sessions may be more effective for teaching medical students concepts such as justice, resource allocation, and professionalism.
Because physicians are the gatekeepers to end-of-life care services and their referral patterns vary, those patterns are worthy targets for intervention.