Eliciting the patient’s motives and goals and helping the patient and her loved ones explore alternatives are essential to maintaining trusting relationships and open communication.

Clinicians must avoid violating professional ethical principles and patients’ legal rights and they may not ever discriminate. So, what does that mean in practice?

Suggests to medical students what forms of self-disclosure are acceptable during clinical encounters and when self-disclosure might be interpreted by patients as taking attention away from them.

Suggests to medical students what forms of self-disclosure are acceptable during clinical encounters and when self-disclosure might be interpreted by patients as taking attention away from them.

An aggregation of evidence over a span of decades has established as a bedrock fact of modern epidemiology that tobacco, poor diet, and lack of physical activity constitute the leading causes of chronic disease, including cardiovascular disease, and premature death.

Patients have the ethical and legal right to choose their physicians for whatever reasons they wish, but physicians need not let patient prejudices go unremarked upon.

Stressful life experience associated with racial and ethnic discrimination can have detrimental effects on the coronary and cardiovascular health of people in historically marginalized groups.

Patients can use Internet sources to select physicians; physicians who use patient databases to select or reject patients, however, cross a professional-ethical boundary.