Dr Christy Cauley joins Ethics Talk to discuss her article, coauthored with Dr Zara Cooper: "Which Priorities Should Guide Palliative Surgical Research?"
Priorities far beyond generating morbidity or mortality data are needed to improve patients’ experiences, innovate metrics, and advance surgical palliation as a field.
AMA J Ethics. 2021;23(10):E806-810. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2021.806.
The clinician/healer must both address the disease and seek to know how the medical condition is being experienced by the patient—what impact it has on his or her life and spirit.
Surgery’s unique characteristics, including difficulties in standardizing, blinding, and recruiting participants for clinical trials, render problematic the application of evidence-based standards to surgery.