Promoting altruism in the context of a compensated health care career is contradictory and misguided. Instead, an approach to clinical care that is prosocial and empathic is recommended. Training in mindfulness, self-reflection and emotion skills may help medical students and professionals to recognise, regulate and behaviourally demonstrate empathy within clinical and professional encounters. However, health care initiatives to increase empathy and other humanistic qualities will be limited unless more practical and feasible emotion skills training is offered to and accepted by medical students. Success will be further moderated by the culture of medicine's full acceptance of empathy and humanism into its customs, beliefs, values, interactions and daily practices.

The integration of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals into the U.S. military is a long-standing and politically and socially divisive issue. Exclusionary and pseudo-inclusionary policies that restrict openly LGB individuals from military service are also of long duration. Yet LGB servicemembers have continued to serve covertly in the military for many decades. Moreover, political issues and social conventions associated with "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) have diverted focus from imperative research issues, such as LGB servicemembers and incidents of victimization in the military. Research is reviewed to evaluate such victimization, which is conceptualized as resulting from a convergence of sexual stigma, conservative gender role beliefs, and sexual prejudice. DADT, in combination with overarching difficulties intrinsic to sexual orientation research, serves to augment LGB victimization and reduce victim reports and help seeking. Consequently, there is a deficient evidence base for assisting LGB servicemembers and for advancing research, prevention efforts, and policy changes. Implications of repealing DADT are discussed, as are future directions for LGB military research.

It is posited in the empathy-altruism hypothesis that altruistic motivation evoked by empathy is directed toward the ultimate goal of improving another person's welfare. In this study the empathy-altruism hypothesis was examined. Measures of altruism, empathy, and social desirability were completed by 112 individuals in a university setting. A positive and significant association was found between altruism and empathy (r^ = .24, p = .01, 95% CI [.06-.41]). No significant associations were found between social desirability and altruism or between social desirability and empathy. Because the loss of capacity to feel empathy may lead to burnout, disulusionment, and reduced altruistic helping efforts, the clinical applicability and implications of these findings are particularly important to health care and other helping professions.