Withholding information from patients during an informed consent process is ethically unacceptable. Patients may restrict the amount of information they wish to receive or designate someone else to receive the information for them.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(3):209-214. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.3.ecas2-1503.
Lusine Aghajanova, MD, PhD and Cecilia T. Valdes, MD
While sex selection of children for nonmedical reasons is not prohibited in the United States, the authors believe that sperm sorting should not be used until more safety data are available.
When a patient requests an unfamiliar treatment, the physician should not hesitate to research it before giving a categorical reply about its safety or efficacy.
Jessie Kimbrough-Sugick, MD, MPH, Jessica Holzer, MA, and Eric B. Bass, MD, MPH
Researchers who approach community partners with an agenda already in hand are missing the point of the community-based participatory research enterprise: developing priorities for study together.
Patients can use Internet sources to select physicians; physicians who use patient databases to select or reject patients, however, cross a professional-ethical boundary.
Medicaid is a vital piece of health care for children; any decision to close a practice to new Medicaid patients means more preventable illness, more severe, acute illness among children, and an overloaded community emergency department.
The guidelines for patients’ eligibility for bariatric surgery have not changed since 1991, although recent data suggest there may be indications for broadening application of the surgery.
U.S. physicians have a duty to treat patients who receive organ transplants abroad and many believe that there are ways to reduce the shortage of organs for transplant in the U.S.
A discussion of the ethical issues raised by a patient’s request for off-label, prophylactic bariatric surgery to prevent diabetes mellitus type 2 (DM type 2).