Dr Cynthia Geppert joins Ethics Talk to discuss how teaching health professions students and trainees about palliative psychiatry reinvigorates core philosophy of medicine investigations into what health care is for.
Cyrus Ahalt, MPP, Rebecca Sudore, MD, Marielle Bolano, Lia Metzger, Anna M. Darby, MD, MPH, and Brie Williams, MD, MS
The teach-to-goal method should be used to assess comprehension of incarcerated patients and other vulnerable groups during the informed consent process.
AMA J Ethics. 2017;19(9):862-872. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2017.19.9.peer3-1709.
Research in the PED and PICU is essential to medical understanding of the efficacy of emergency interventions. Researchers must minimize the additional stress that consent and participation in research entail for pediatric patients and their families.
The physician must help patients understand that all options—further testing, surgery, no action—carry risks and benefits. Disclosing the statistical probability of injury and other possible outcomes might help, but it can also hinder the process.
After assessing the reasons for a patient’s unrealistic hopefulness in the face of clear understanding, a clinician may believe that significant harm will come to the patient if he or she does not acknowledge the seriousness of the illness.
Requirements for informed consent are relatively vague and the exceptions are few, so it is in the physician’s best interest to inform patients about proposed treatment options, ascertain that they understand their choices, and secure their consent.
The neurodiversity movement challenges us to rethink autism through the lens of human diversity, valuing diversity in neurobiologic development as we would value it in gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation.