What professional responsibility does a physician have for a patient after handing the case off to those in the subsequent shift? Should he or she comment on the next team’s approach to care?

The medical student's anatomy-lab cadaver is not exactly a patient, but neither is the cadaver merely an object.

The author argues that long-term trends point to a future for physician assistants and nurse practitioners as the principal front-line deliverers of primary care, with physicians focusing on managerial duties and specialty care.

When a patient is turfed, the interdisciplinary relationships take on the characteristics of a power play. In medicine, duties to patients are paramount, and some physicians appear to consider themselves in some ways exempt from that duty.

When family members request treatment, physicians should attempt to see that they get good care, preserve good relationships with them, and put neither themselves nor their relatives at risk.

Well designed and effectively implemented ACOs should help those who deliver primary care become trusted elicitors of informed patient preferences and knowledgeable coordinators of care.

From day one, students are taught that solid relationships with patients are the foundation of successful medical practice.

We consult our doctors for expert medical advice, not phenomenological analysis, but perhaps a wide gulf ought not separate empirical science and research from phenomenological reflection and analysis on illness.

An undercurrent in all debates about allocation of health care resources to the poor is the matter of access to and coverage of health care for immigrants, particularly low-income and undocumented ones.

Fibromyalgia, with no positive tests, is a “foreigner” in the medical landscape. Medicine looks for signs of pathology, changes in the structure or function of organs. The mantra of physicians facing patients with fibromyalgia: “Your tests are normal.”