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.
What duty, if any, do individual physicians have to lobby and advocate for policy solutions that may impact the health and health care of patients and the public
Nontherapeutic infant male circumcision is not medically or ethically justifiable and should be deferred until the person is able to decide for himself.
AMA J Ethics. 2017;19(8):815-824. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2017.19.8.msoc2-1708.
James Mills Jr., MD, a founder of emergency medicine, believed he could have greater impact on medical care for the poor in his city by giving up his practice and working in the emergency room full time.
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.
A physician has an obligation to order necessary diagnostic tests for a patient on Medicaid with whom he or she has an established patient-physician relationship regardless of whether the cost of the necessary test will be reimbursed.