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Opinion: A dangerous view: Why it’s a mistake for medical schools to ignore social justice

An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal called for getting back to basics in medical school and forgoing teaching on gun violence or other social issues. The author has it…
A student medical volunteer takes the blood pressure of a homeless man at a shelter in Morgantown, W.Va. A small tempest erupted over a doctor's call for scaling back teaching social issues in medical school and getting back to the basics.

During my first days as a supervising resident physician at a large urban hospital, two questions were constantly on my mind, the key drivers of any medical decisions that I would make: How can we stop this from happening again? How can we prevent this suffering from getting worse?

These questions, and the principles that guided my approach to them, were largely those I established during my undergraduate education and my four years at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of an understanding not only of physiology and diagnosis, but also of the importance of social justice in treating illness.

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