Particularly in a small community, patients may want to avoid the social stigma of seeking mental health care by receiving it from their primary care physician—who may know them well enough to have some insights an unfamiliar specialist would not.
Anne-Marie Laberge, MD, PhD and Wylie Burke, MD, PhD
Physicians and counselors must address the importance of communicating genetic test results to family members in the pre-test counseling and informed-consent processes prior to testing.
A medical student’s desire to practice the specialty that he or she finds most interesting should not outweigh the right of patients in a pluralistic society to receive a full range of legal medical services.
Writing a case study of a psychiatric patient may change the patient-physician dynamic even if the patient consents to be written about. And when the patient is a minor and consent must involve her parents, the process becomes even more complicated.
There is a market for direct-to-consumer genetic testing and a need for better consumer information and more regulation of tests and testing laboratories.
U.S. and international medical organizations recommend against testing children for genetic diseases that occur after adolescence and for which no prevention or treatment is available.
U.S. and international medical organizations recommend against testing children for genetic diseases that occur after adolescence and for which no prevention or treatment is available.