Reducing racial disparities in pain treatment requires an interdisciplinary approach to identifying causes of racial biases and teaching health care professionals to recognize and reduce them.

In the perioperative surgical home, the anesthesiologist coordinates care with other team members to provide seamless continuity from preoperative evaluation to postoperative care.

Effective patient-physician communication requires that the physician show empathy, express concern, be sensitive to nonverbal communication, and, more generally, follow the Golden Rule.

With their expertise in physiology, pharmacology, and resuscitation, anesthesiologists made essential contributions to the development of critical care medicine.

Anesthesiology developed into a profession in the first third of the twentieth century with the establishment of professorships, training programs, board certification, and journals in anesthesiology and advances in delivering and in understanding the effects of anesthesia.

Withholding information from patients during an informed consent process is ethically unacceptable. Patients may restrict the amount of information they wish to receive or designate someone else to receive the information for them.

The Anesthesiology Quality Institute contributes both to local quality improvement in the practice of anesthesiology through data collection and establishment of benchmarks and to patient safety in partnership with the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation.

Medical specialty boards improve the quality and safety of health care, but they can overreach, and their board members express disapproval of board action by petition and through legal action.

Given full information about the risks of long-term opioid therapy, patients often see the value of exploring other options rather than thinking their physicians are reluctant to prescribe narcotics for fear of litigation or regulatory action.

Although there are valid reasons to suspend do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders during surgery, the decision to do so should be discussed with patients and should take into account their goals and objectives.