Jennifer Aldrich, MD, Jessica Kant, MSW, LICSW, MPH, and Eric Gramszlo
Estelle v Gamble (1976) reiterates that the 8th Amendment to the US Constitution requires adequate care to be offered to all people who are incarcerated.
AMA J Ethics. 2023;25(6):E407-413. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2023.407.
The legal definition of a patient and the corresponding duties of the physician have been debated in state courts for over a century, and many aspects of the question are still unresolved.
Argument that physicians called upon for expert testimony in court have an ethical duty to educate the jury by offering opinions based upon published, clinically based evidence and peer-reviewed medical literature.