When medical students are involved in patient care as part of their education and training, patients must be informed of their status and provide written or oral consent to be treated.
A bioethicist who had thyroid cancer as a child describes his recent positive experience as an adult patient with his surgeon and how his surgeon's bioethics training helped the patient-physician relationship.
Readers are referred to an article in a 1999 issue of JAMA to discuss whether medical professionalism should be explicitly taught in medical schools and residency programs.