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.
Movements to deinstitutionalize people with mental illness and to make institutionalization more legally difficult have resulted in a lack of space and resources for the care of those with severe mental illness, and many have ended up in jails and prisons.
Laurel J. Lyckholm, MD and Arwa K. Aburizik, MD, MS
Decision-making capacity can be preserved in patients with mental illness and should be formally assessed in the context of their values and past decisions.
AMA J Ethics. 2017;19(5):444-453. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2017.19.5.ecas4-1705.
A year after Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Pou was arrested and charged with one count of second-degree murder and nine counts of conspiracy to commit second-degree murder for administering drugs to patients who subsequently died.
State medical boards, tend to follow social policy as expressed in U.S. law, which designates moral turpitude outside the clinic as a cause for restricting professional licenses.
Our ability to infer mental states from fMRI scans is still rudimentary, but the time may be approaching when neuroimaging can be used to indicate witnesses’ reliability in court proceedings.