AMA Journal of Ethics

Death’s legal definition must be responsive to advances in technology, and it must delineate between life and death. Knowing where to draw the line is difficult.

Since 1968, ethical questions about brain death have become “well settled,” yet remain “persistently unresolved.”

Lack of ethical, legal, and clinical consensus about best practice sometimes combines with a poor clinical evidence base.

This article considers relevant history that informs the AMA Code of Medical Ethics' opinions about neurological criteria for death.

Criteria in statutes and tests used to diagnose brain death don’t always jibe, and this can undermine public trust in death pronouncements.

A patient’s transition from “living” to “dying” is not socially marked in the same way death is marked, and this is both clinically and ethically relevant.

Risk managers can help patient-subjects and clinician-researchers make informed novel device implantation decisions in the absence of preclinical trial data.

Ethical dimensions of risk management are illuminated in AMA Code content on discharge planning.

Clinical decision supports create ethically complex risks and need to align patients’ and caregivers’ professed values.

Benches represent collective unity and are places of reflection for individual and communal decision making.