Physicians need to understand when it may be appropriate to let patients get involved in medical decision-making and when it may be necessary to provide their personal medical judgment.
A physician describes how patients are selected for gastric bypass surgery in his practice and the lifelong relationship he commits to with his surgical patients.
Patients for gastric bypass surgery should be carefully selected on the basis of several objective factors, and those chosen should be treated and monitored by specialized teams to optimize outcomes.
The author describes some of the diverse training paths that may lead to becoming a bioethicist and how the breadth of this field is useful in exploring many ethical questions in the field of medicine.
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.