Clinicians must avoid violating professional ethical principles and patients’ legal rights and they may not ever discriminate. So, what does that mean in practice?
AMA J Ethics. 2016;18(3):229-236. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2016.18.3.ecas4-1603.
Web-based physician rating sites are part of a multi-decade cultural shift in the relationship between physicians, patients, and society. But a system in which “patient’s orders” reign is just as lopsided as one that puts “doctor’s orders” in the driver’s seat.
Christopher Madden, MD, Aaron D. Campbell, MD, MHS, and Jessica Pierce, PhD
The use of medication for the prevention and treatment of life-threatening altitude-related illness is very different, medically and morally, from the use of medication to enhance performance.
Conflicts between federal and state laws governing marijuana, lack of evidence about its efficacy as a treatment, and physicians' inability to predict or control dosage would all be aided by reclassification of the drug that would let clinical research go forward.
Patients can use Internet sources to select physicians; physicians who use patient databases to select or reject patients, however, cross a professional-ethical boundary.