This article examines conceptual limitations of extant accounts of palliative psychiatry, with a focus on obligations to distinguish among and clearly formulate goals of care.
AMA J Ethics. 2023;25(9):E710-717. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2023.710.
Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD and Dorothy E. Roberts, JD
The call for structural competency encourages medicine to broaden its approach to matters of race and culture so that it might better address both individual-level doctor and patient characteristics and institutional factors.
Clinicians' reluctance to engage in environmental interventions for children's psychiatric illnesses, which may seem to implicate parents, may stem from a desire to stand apart from mid-twentieth-century psychiatrists who blamed mothers for pediatric mental illness.
Registries of those considered dangerous focus wrongly on those with mental illness, who account for only 4 percent of violent acts committed in the United States.
We should conduct empirical research to better understand how patients, parents, clinicians, and others grapple with the ethical challenges we confront when caring for children who are dying.
When evaluating the developments and complications of a marginally viable premature infant, physicians and parents must work together to decide on treatment that is in the infant’s best interest.
Physicians should be aware of the level of emotional distress and suffering that a patient is experiencing as a result of his or her illness and incorporate that into the patient's treatment plan.
Plastic surgeons need to carefully evaluate the degree of deformity, physical and emotional maturity, and desired outcome for adolescent patients who request elective cosmetic surgery.