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

When a clinician refuses to do a procedure consistent with standard of care for a patient, legal resources can be helpful.

Mission statements offer limited benefit when patients do not have meaningful choices about where to seek care and can be misused.

Unchallenged supra-geographic segregation perpetuates racial medical mythology, exacerbates myopia in health professions practice and education, and perpetuates injustice.

Training in a segregated health care system means that health professions students and trainees learn bias and experience helplessness and burnout.

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.

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.

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

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