Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS®) protocols vary by surgery type and are compared, clinically and ethically, to traditional protocols.

Underrecognition and lack of awareness about how to help patients with painful menstruation constitute injustice and a health care harm.

Dr Liam G. McCoy joins Ethics Talk to discuss his article, coauthored with Drs Zainab Doleeb, Jazleen Dada, and Catherine Allaire: “Underrecognition of Dysmenorrhea Is an Iatrogenic Harm.”

Given full information about the risks of long-term opioid therapy, patients often see the value of exploring other options rather than thinking their physicians are reluctant to prescribe narcotics for fear of litigation or regulatory action.

The first women’s movement in the mid-nineteenth century endorsed anesthesia during childbirth and some of the very patterns of obstetric practice that became anathema to the natural childbirth movement a century later.

Protecting one’s moral integrity may require a conscience clause that protects positive conscience claims by permitting individuals to perform actions that are otherwise prohibited by legal or institutional rules.

Society is best served by an approach to conscience that combines a progressive understanding of patients’ needs, a nuanced determination of when those needs translate into claims, and a limited role for conscientious refusal.

Anesthesiology developed into a profession in the first third of the twentieth century with the establishment of professorships, training programs, board certification, and journals in anesthesiology and advances in delivering and in understanding the effects of anesthesia.

Reducing racial disparities in pain treatment requires an interdisciplinary approach to identifying causes of racial biases and teaching health care professionals to recognize and reduce them.

Effective patient-physician communication requires that the physician show empathy, express concern, be sensitive to nonverbal communication, and, more generally, follow the Golden Rule.