This photograph of a kaleidoscope of potentially life-saving and potentially life-threatening pills suggests ethical conflict inherent in clinicians’ strivings to meet patients’ pain relief needs without contributing crises of drug diversion.
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(9):E894-896. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2018.894.
Georgina Morley, PhD, MSc, RN and Annie Sharon Fox, MA
This series of 3 paintings of figures in a bath explores emotional responses of persons experiencing or responding to others’ moral distress. Intricately tied together and connected through time and space, the bodies represented suggest a complex web of relationships between clinicians and patients.
AMA J Ethics. 2019;21(5):E457-460. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2019.457.
Health workers care for COVID-19 patients, just as St Roch tended to bubonic plague victims during the Renaissance. Three artworks relate Roch’s story and apply key insights to the 2020 pandemic.
AMA J Ethics. 2020;22(5):E441-445. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2020.441.
Most physicians schedule out months in advance, requiring their patients to cope with their condition until their appointment and risk their suffering becoming discredited.
AMA J Ethics. 2022;24(12):E1181-1182. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2022.1181.
In the iconic painting Broken Column, Kahlo represents her spine as a Greek column that is fractured and disintegrating. In this beautiful and tragic interpretation, the fractured column bespeaks Kahlo’s physical weakness and emotional instability.
Beyond consensus that pain is “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience,” its biology remains poorly understood, and options for its treatment remain frustratingly inadequate.