Senior MCG pupil edits April version of Ame

AUGUSTA, Ga. (April 11, 2023) – A senior on the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University is the visitor editor for this month’s version of the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics, targeted on meat manufacturing and consumption and the results of each on folks’s well being.

Elena Diller, a local of Rome, Georgia, who will graduate from MCG in Might and head to an inner medication residency on the College of Texas’ Medical Department in Galveston, was chosen for the chance throughout her freshman 12 months. With steerage from her mentor Laura Williamson, PhDdirector of the AU Middle for Bioethics and Well being Coverage, Diller first had to decide on a theme subject and proposed moral questions round it.

“One of many issues I’ve been considerate about for a very long time is our meals system and the best way we use meat and dairy merchandise in our food regimen, and the way that’s intertangled with our well being,” Diller says. “It’s not nearly what meat does in our our bodies, but in addition in regards to the well being of the employees who’re producing the meat and the results of manufacturing on the setting. Meals has at all times been attention-grabbing to me. There’s a lot to take pleasure in about it, however there’s loads we have to perceive in regards to the impression.”

Her years-long work on the version included writing and enhancing case commentaries that discover a variety of points, from what ought to be thought-about when offering dietary counseling to sufferers with low incomes to how hospitals may provide extra vegetarian choices for sufferers. She additionally got here up with matters for articles about coverage — on matters like whether or not meat and poultry crops endanger employees and what well being professions college students ought to find out about industrial agriculture and illness — and sought out professional authors to write down them.

Diller, who additionally accomplished the AU Institute of Public and Preventive Health’s Graduate Certificate in Bioethics program whereas she was in medical faculty, says she has at all times been taken with moral points associated to well being and hopes to at some point sit on the ethics committee for the well being care facility she works for.

“I believe a number of occasions, significantly in well being care, we would like one proper reply to an issue and there’s not at all times that one proper reply,” she says. “There are methods (to strategy a difficulty) which can be higher than others — and positively there could be a nuanced debate on both facet. But when we try to maintain altering issues in well being care and finally make folks more healthy, we ought to be having discussions about how we finest do this.”

The American Medical Affiliation Journal of Ethics’ mission is to assist medical college students, physicians and all well being care professionals make sound moral selections in service to sufferers and society. Based in 1999, the journal explores moral questions and challenges that college students and clinicians confront of their instructional and observe careers.

Learn the April version, Meat and Well being online.