The ACGME milestones initiative promises to improve the process of assessing medical resident competency by providing, throughout the course of residency training, systematic, comprehensive, and specialty-specific evaluation of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Education’s six clinical competencies.

The ethics of treating patients with a variety of physical impairments and disabilities is as complex as the clinical challenges.

Because knowledge about the efficacy of long-term opioid use is lacking, decisions about opioid treatment for chronic nonmalignant pain should be guided by a six-step decision making process that is based in clinical ethics.

The ACA does not, as intended, provide equal access to health care, due to financial and geographic barriers, and low coverage limits access to habilitative and rehabilitative services.

My most important job is to help my patients (and their families) who are depressed, grieving, or angry following severe injury or illness to imagine possible narratives for the next chapter of life.

Health outcomes for people who have had amputations are affected not only by barriers to access, such as race, socioeconomic status and cost, but also by the type of facility where they receive treatment and rehabilitative services.

Physical medicine and rehabilitation has developed into a medical specialty that aims to restore optimal patient function in multiple dimensions of life with an interdisciplinary approach to care delivery.

Caregiver trustworthiness and a competent patient’s prerogative to return to suboptimal living conditions are critical considerations in discharge planning.

Although the practice guidelines of several medical organizations recommend against treating friends or relatives, they make exceptions for emergencies or the unavailability of other qualified physicians.

Since the late 1970s, radical changes have occurred in the patient-physician relationship and in practice management and administration, and the future holds promise of more evidence-supported treatments.