AMA Journal of Ethics

What's known as the chilling effect means immigrants are not using health services to which they are entitled. Clinicians and students can act to help safeguard immigrants’ rights.

Using crowdsourced information in health professions education can help motivate critical appraisal, question asking, and evidence evaluation skill development, especially among “digital natives.”

Physicians need better education in nutrition science. Referring patients to nutrition experts for dietary counseling would motivate food availability and intake assessment as routine. Good clinical counseling considers patients' cultural traditions and environmental sustainability as key ethical values.

When patients look for strategies to improve their overall health, diet and nutrition are often a logical place to start—after all, what we consume has enormous impact on our susceptibility to disease and disability. But health care professionals don’t always have the time or expertise to address nutrition effectively in a clinical encounter, and might not know how to respond to broader issues around food availability in their community. This month on Ethics Talk, we talk about why clinicians should care about food ethics and what they can do to address nutrition in clinical and community settings. Our guests were Dr. Jessica Fanzo, Dr. David Katz, and Haley Swartz.

Six cohorts of first-year medical students have been shown to have negative attitudes about obesity that are consistent over time. Attitudes can be improved, however, by using popular media and an ethics framework to discuss personal experiences and beliefs about obesity.

Interdisciplinary support, securing reliable information from a patient’s health record, and taking a “who, what, when, where, and how” approach to conversation can improve care planning with dying patients and their loved ones.

Awareness of transference reactions, practicing active listening and reflection, pausing, and articulating one’s understanding of another’s emotional motivations can help cultivate deeper patient-clinician relationships at the end of life.

Educators discussing ethically challenging topics with students should try to cultivate open mindedness while illuminating potential negative consequences that their health practice beliefs—such as refusing to provide abortion care—can have for patients, particularly those with limited options.