An attending physician in an urban teaching hospital faces an ethical dilemma when a mother refused to allow an African American medical student to examine her child.
The Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs reports how the AMA's Code of Medical Ethics has evolved over the years to provide two opinions that address which patients physicians have the right to choose to serve and when physicians can terminate a therapeutic relationship.
The journal will present narrated stories from JAMA's A Piece of My Mind column to illustrate how spoken words reveal much about the relationship between patient and physician. Readers are referred to a story by S.A. Schmidt in a 1996 issue of JAMA.