When the hospital serves McDonald’s | The Atlantic

February 9, 2016
By Shilpa Ravella

There was a time when doctors walked through hospital wards with a cigarette in one hand and a stethoscope in the other. Once the health dangers of smoking became apparent, though, hospitals were some of the first institutions to ban smoking in public spaces, and other places followed suit. Less than a century ago, it was unheard of to forbid smoking on hospital grounds; today, it’s unheard of to find cigarettes for sale in a hospital gift shop. As Lesser wrote in a 2013 editorial for the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, “offsets from selling foods that clearly damage human health would, likewise, be indefensible … Serving definitively unhealthful food items to patients, visitors, and staff is simply unethical.”

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