Dr Brent M. Kious joins Ethics Talk to discuss his article, coauthored with Dr Ryan H. Nelson: “Does It Matter Whether a Psychiatric Intervention Is ‘Palliative’?”
Dr Anna L. Westermair joins Ethics Talk to discuss her article, coauthored with Dr Manuel Trachsel: “Moral Intuitions About Futility as Prompts for Evaluating Goals in Mental Health Care.”
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.
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.
Developing technologies for personalized medicine may be misused to popularize the idea that one can infer a person’s genetic makeup from observer-defined or self-reported assignment to a race or ethnic group.
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.