Toward an Ethics of Community-Academic Partnership.

Community-academic partnerships, which often form unexpectedly, can be time consuming, tedious, and sometimes awkward alliances, yet they arise out of perceived needs and can be fruitful. Putting aside hierarchy to explore such partnerships as communities themselves that seek to capitalize on the strengths, knowledge, and life experiences of each stakeholder can offer a fresh perspective for thinking about the ethics of community-academic partnerships. This commentary explores the partnerships detailed in the symposia through the lens of ethnography.

Thinking about Conscience.

The path to consensus about physicians' exercise of conscience was not linear. It looped back on itself as new insights illuminated earlier deliberations and in turn led to further insights. In particular, coming to agreement about physicians' responsibility in regard to referral charted a route through many course corrections.

Report by the American Medical Association's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs on Physicians' Exercise of Conscience.

As practicing clinicians, physicians are expected to uphold the ethical norms of their profession, including fidelity to patients and respect for patients' self-determination. At the same time, as individuals, physicians are moral agents in their own right and, like their patients, are informed by and committed to diverse cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions and beliefs. In some circumstances, the expectation that physicians will put patients' needs and preferences first may be in tension with the need to sustain the sense of moral integrity and continuity that grounds a physician's personal and professional life.

The Rashomon effect: another view of medicine, religion, and the American Medical Association.

What is the story of medicine and religion at the American Medical Association (AMA)? Where did the Department of Medicine and Religion originate? What did the program accomplish? Why was it all but completely discontinued after scarcely a decade? The surviving records support more than one interpretation. Exploring the broader organizational context helps tell a richer story.In this issue of Academic Medicine, Daniel Kim and colleagues open a window on a fascinating bit of history: that of the AMA's formal experience with religion and medicine during the 1960s and early 1970s; however, reconstructing the story of a program from documentary records is always something of an uncertain proposition.