Dr Helen Stanton Chapple joins Ethics Talk to talk about teaching health professions students and trainees about acknowledging and realizing dying in a healthy way.
A philosophical analysis of how physician actions and treatment goals are defined and interpreted and how understanding this process can affect the success of the clinical encounter.
Physicians have an obligation to consider a patient’s quality of life when making treatment decisions and should consider giving patients the options of withholding or withdrawing aggressive treatment if that treatment will not restore the kind of life the patient finds meaningful.
A case that illustrates how Western medicine's body or mind approach to diagnosis and treatment can differ from that of many patients from non-Western cultures.
A coming-of-age memoir about one man's journey into womanhood underscores the important role that physicians can play to recognize transgenderism in adolescents and coordinate the care for gender reassignment.
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.