Physicians have a responsibility to assess elderly patients for conditions that could affect their ability to drive safely and to be familiar with state laws that govern physician duty to report impaired drivers.
This process of developing EBM-based guidelines and applying them to clinical care highlights the tension between generating unbiased knowledge based on statistical aggregation and the application of this information to individual patients.
Extending immunosuppressive drug coverage for the lifetime of kidney patients, instead of only covering dialysis, would be a cost-effective way for the federal government to reduce the costs of posttransplant care while improving clinical outcomes for patients.
An adolescent patient with poor social support who has already lost one transplanted kidney due to complications of nonadherence may not automatically be inappropriate to list for a second transplant if he can prove his ability to adhere to the demands of a dialysis regimen.