Rereading The House of God prompts us to ask, first, do we take better care of house staff today and, second, if we do, have those changes resulted in better patient care?
Reflective learning during and after challenging experiences can be used to foster medical students’ moral development and professional identity formation.
AMA J Ethics. 2017;19(4):349-356. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2017.19.4.medu1-1704.
James Mills Jr., MD, a founder of emergency medicine, believed he could have greater impact on medical care for the poor in his city by giving up his practice and working in the emergency room full time.
Michael Hawking, MD, MSc, Farr A. Curlin, MD, and John D. Yoon, MD
Applying a virtue ethics approach—and especially the virtues of courage and compassion—enables clinicians to care appropriately for “difficult” patients.
AMA J Ethics. 2017;19(4):357-363. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2017.19.4.medu2-1704.
Visual literacy modules can help trainees learn to integrate narrative and visual information in clinical encounters. The medical humanities curriculum at Australia’s Bond University uses art to build students’ diagnostic skills.
AMA J Ethics. 2016;18(8):843-854. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2016.18.8.imhl1-1608.
Nancy Berlinger, PhD and Annalise Berlinger, BSN, RN
Physicians’ reliance on “culture” to explain patients’ noncompliance may serve as code for their discomfort with difference, uncertainty, and distress.
AMA J Ethics. 2017;19(6):608-616. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2017.19.6.msoc1-1706.
Comics allowed me to convey multiple layers of a single experience. With both text and image at my disposal, I could use one to enhance the other or create contradictions and juxtapositions that were jarring or darkly humorous.
Readers, whether critics, the general public, or health care professionals, respond emotionally to physicians who reveal themselves literally and metaphorically in their writing.