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.
Health care professionals and those who teach them must be prepared to examine the implications of carbon dioxide emissions on human well-being and make decisive steps towards sustainability.
Physicians will have a greater impact on health if they advocate for changes needed to prevent illness and harm than if they simply patch up those who are sick or harmed.
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.
An attempt to investigate correlations between race, attitudes, and contraceptive use did not find meaningful associations between race and attitudes about birth control or pregnancy that could influence contraceptive choice.
Until measures of training and experience can be correlated with patient outcomes, information about a clinic's experience with egg freezing will not be useful in patient decision making.
In the September 2014 issue on physicians as agents of social change, Dr. Audiey Kao, editor-in-chief of Virtual Mentor interviewed Dr. Rajiv Shah, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development or USAID.