The 2013 BRAIN Research Initiative calls for the integration of ethics into medical education and all levels of research, from hypothesis generation to evaluation, which promises to provide an ethical foundation for all future biomedical research.

Approval of requests for exceptions to duty-hour restrictions from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) may require increasing the complement of midlevel practitioners, implementing innovative resident scheduling, and using social learning techniques to increase efficiency.

Approval of requests for exceptions to duty-hour restrictions from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) may require increasing the complement of midlevel practitioners, implementing innovative resident scheduling, and using social learning techniques to increase efficiency.

Four models of international aid in neurosurgery can be categorized by the level of the commitment and the breadth of applications, each giving rise to a different set of ethical problems that may involve challenges to access, sustainability, equity, or informed consent processes in health care.

Treatment decisions in high-risk situations require a dynamic relationship between doctor and patient in which patient preferences and clinician recommendations contribute equally in shaping a final treatment decision.

The authors describe a historical pattern in which a set of enabling technologies facilitates rapid advances in medical practice, resulting in recognition of new ethical challenges and a decades-long struggle to resolve them.

Rather than a scholarly exercise, we have sought to create a living showcase of the most important ethical issues in neurosurgery circa 2015.

Surgery is appropriate when the needs and expected benefits outweigh the risks for a well-informed patient.

Surgery’s unique characteristics, including difficulties in standardizing, blinding, and recruiting participants for clinical trials, render problematic the application of evidence-based standards to surgery.

Telemedicine has generated new models for efficient patient care, decreased disparities in access, and been criticized for its limitations.