How should evidence be used to interpret and inform whether to accommodate patients’ requests for clinicians with specific traits?

This narrative illuminates need for students and clinicians to be well prepared to face ethically and structurally complex realities of identifying and responding to children.

Principles of respect for autonomy, beneficence, and nonmaleficence guide trauma-informed care. Care ethics should also support this framework for responding to the health needs of trafficked patients.

Dialogue-based learning can help medical students recognize, acknowledge, and overcome their biases.

Pediatricians should not opt out of caring for children of same-sex couples due to anti-gay beliefs or bias.

Instead of succumbing to the urge to portray cultural differences as a dichotomy between clashing opposites, we should endeavor to note our common humanity, acknowledge the plurality of viewpoints within a given culture, and appreciate that cultures can evolve without being untrue to themselves.

When deciding whether a pregnant woman will take antidepressants that pose a slight risk to the fetus, the patient and doctor must each make value-based determinations about whether absolute protection of the fetus is more important than preventing the mother’s probable suffering.

“Difficult” patient-physician encounters have roots in uncertainty about individuals’ trustworthiness, clinicians’ skills and training, and medical science.

A physician attorney argues that the best way to ensure that physicians don't refuse to treat patients is to create a system in which their medical education is fully funded and they must repay a debt to society.