To be a useful tool for assessing quality of physician care, pay-for-performance must be designed to include process measures and to not penalize physicians for treating patients with difficult-to-manage conditions.

Evidence-based medicine can help guide a physician in the clinical encounter but should not replace physician judgment or experience.

Physicians should be aware of the influence that their observable health and lifestyle habits have on patients.

Analysis of a journal article that compares physician self-assessment with external measures of physician competence.

US attitudes toward aging drive patient demands for elective medical and surgical services. Ethical physicians must make sure patients have realistic expectations.

Medical malpractice pits the legal system's ethics of client advocacy against the medical profession's ethics of patient advocacy. Fear of liability may lead to defensive medicine, an aberration of both professions' intent.

Editor's introduction to a Virtual Mentor issue on the goals of medicine, in which authors explore how the goals of medicine are set and suggest how to approach decision making when patient requests seem to stretch the boundaries of medicine proper.

Physicians who specialize in assisted reproductive technology should advise parents-to-be of the health and psychosocial risks of preimplantation sex selection for nonmedical reasons.

The Keiskamma Altarpiece, bears witness to the AIDS crisis, performing for South Africa the same narrative function that the Isenheim Altarpiece, a 16th-century masterpiece, did for medieval Europe during a plague.

A medical student's perspective on the importance of empathy in patient-physician relationships and a reflection on how empathy was taught in his medical school.