“See! It’s not all in my head!” Attaching a medical label to behaviors can reframe their social meaning.

Studies have found that, contrary to what their physicians may have expected, patients were less satisfied with primary care appointments in which physician self-disclosure occurred and reported feeling less warmth, comfort, friendliness and reassurance in those appointments.

The early diagnosis of Alzheimer disease is a boon in that it enables advance planning, but that planning process can engender conflict between respect for future-oriented autonomy and future welfare.

Revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders aim to ground diagnoses in empirical evidence, make them less stigmatizing, and incorporate assessments of patients' functioning over time.

Educating patients is an important part of practicing medicine, and, especially when health care-related legislation is changing, doctors may receive political questions from patients. They may want to have brief, prepared answers to such questions, but they should protect the clinical relationship by limiting discussions that are too long or too heated.

The adoption of the accountable care organization model means that coordination of care will greatly improve, doctors will end up taking a much more active role in preventive care, and access will have to increase dramatically, perhaps with office-hour changes to accommodate patients' schedules.

The future success of the Affordable Care Act depends on doctors' willingness to take the lead in identifying reforms that will lead to high-quality, cost-effective health care.

As of October 2011, the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act remained contested, with disagreement among circuit courts about the implications of the individual mandate.

Medicare reimbursement practices have brought the hospital to the center of the American medical system, to the detriment of primary care.

Introduction to the November 2011 issue of Virtual Mentor on the topic of health care reform.