Pairing medical students with chronically ill community volunteers for 2 years helps those students gain appreciation for the experience of illness, develop self-reflection and perspective-taking, and learn to communicate with people who may be quite unlike them.
A close study of a literary memoir can help resident physicians understand the complex, inextricable relationship between a patient’s autonomy and his vulnerability.
Adaptive, simulation-based Internet training sites with intelligent agents can offer medical students a virtual clinic for learning about the process and multiple outcomes of patient decision making.
Argument that physicians called upon for expert testimony in court have an ethical duty to educate the jury by offering opinions based upon published, clinically based evidence and peer-reviewed medical literature.
Chris Feudtner, MD, PhD, MPH, David Munson, MD, and Wynne Morrison, MD
The way that we choose how to frame the conversation with parents about halting or continuing such therapy for their children who will not recover has special importance in medicine and in society.
Posthumous fatherhood and postmenopausal motherhood raise a multitude of legal, ethical, and social concerns that the law and regulatory agencies have not been able to adequately address to date.
A medical student's perspective on the importance of empathy in patient-physician relationships and a reflection on how empathy was taught in his medical school.
Physicians should recognize that patients’ beliefs may cause them to have non-medical explanations for their illnesses and that shared explanations should be negotiated if treatment plans are to be successful.