Lisa is one patient-sitter who took comfort in the permanence of portraiture amidst the uncertainties of tongue cancer. Her experience offers an abundance of lessons for art and healing.

John is one patient-sitter whose cancer and portraiture experiences illuminate what it means to witness, to express regard for another’s difficult health and health care experiences.

During immediate and long-term recovery periods, decisions must account for patients’ personal goals and possible clinical outcomes and should clarify what recovery means.

Shared decision making honors patient autonomy, particularly for preference-sensitive care decisions and even when patients have impaired decision-making capacity.

Shared decision making is complex with patients who are adolescents, whose relational autonomy is still emerging.

Shared decision making in research informed consent conversations is complex due to diverse and potentially divergent interests of investigators and patient-subjects.

Whether a patient’s decisional regret constitutes a failure of shared decision making can depend on how a decision was made.

When errors happen, too often clinicians are at odds with each other about how to respond to a patient or a patient’s loved ones after that patient suffers harm.

Ear, nose, and throat procedures in intraoperative environments often involve surgeons’ and anesthesiologists’ use of shared and sometimes competing approaches to managing a patient’s airway.

Using alternative anesthesia techniques requires collaborative decision making that expresses a patient’s best interest.