The Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program (BHCHP) seeks to build trusting relationships with patients before addressing their medical needs and to take account of their surrounding environment in treatment.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(5):469-472. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.5.mnar2-1505.
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.
Refusals of psychotropic medication by detained criminal defendants raise conflicting dual loyalties for psychiatrists between the duty to treat a patient and the duty to protect society from that patient.
The history of the AMA's policy on anencephalic newborns as organ donors is a living example of what medical science can do sometimes conflicts with society's support or nonsupport of those possibilities.