AMA Journal of Ethics

This portrait of a child against a backdrop of health data suggests how a patient’s individuality can be obscured when precision medicine is used in decision making and developing target therapies.

This photograph of a kaleidoscope of potentially life-saving and potentially life-threatening pills suggests ethical conflict inherent in clinicians’ strivings to meet patients’ pain relief needs without contributing crises of drug diversion.

This image depicts a dying elder undergoing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, suggesting consideration of the ethical weight of the invasiveness and force of chest compressions.

Undocumented patients in the United States with end-stage renal disease receive “compassionate” dialysis. Such patients oscillate between being marginally well and “ill enough” to receive dialysis while clinicians wrestle with complicity in a system that both offers and withholds life-saving therapy.

The weight of mentors’ burnout born by students is depicted in this image of arms entangling anguished faces.

The 3 drawings in this series illustrate how patients’ fears and suffering—generated by dental pain, chemotherapy, or lack of health insurance—can be counterbalanced by the foundational ethical principles of beneficence, nonmaleficence, respect for autonomy, and justice.

This drawing of two hands—one holding pills and another, a rosary—illustrates how clinicians seeking to provide compassionate care must balance maintaining their professional boundaries with understanding of patients’ spirituality.

Images of roadside memorials offer alternatives to representing patients in a trauma bay “scene.”

This comic on the opioid crisis portrays patients’ struggles and physicians’ roles in harm reduction.