This month theme issue editor, Trahern Jones, a fourth-year student at Mayo Medical School in Rochester, Minnesota, spoke with Dr. Edward Laskowski about the use of performance-enhancing drugs and substances among athletes today.
This month, Virtual Mentor interviewed Drew Pinsky, MD, assistant professor of psychiatry at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California and media personality who has been talking to and educating the public about love, sex, and relationships for more than 25 years.
Virtual Mentor interviews Dr. Sayeed to discuss the distinctive challenges of becoming a new mother. He also shares his insights on caring for terminally ill children and helping mothers and fathers come to terms with the unimaginable fact that their child is dying.
Even seasoned doctors can have trouble confronting the topic of death. For medical students, training and role modeling are needed to make them valuable to patients facing death.
Situations in which the patient’s family seems not to be acting in good faith or the patient's suffering is uncontrollable are relatively rare and do not warrant giving physicians unilateral power to withhold or withdraw treatment in all cases of perceived medical futility.
Concerns about the deleterious effects of stress on the mind and body have led to the beginnings of a stress vaccine, an injection that will reduce these effects.
Darryl C. Abrams, MD, Kenneth Prager, MD, Craig D. Blinderman, MD, Kristin M. Burkart, MD, MSc, and Daniel Brodie, MD
The medical community should formulate guidelines for appropriate use of organ-replacement therapies, taking into consideration the resources involved and the clinical expectation that the therapy can serve as a bridge to recovery or transplantation or can be a destination therapy.
Laurel J. Lyckholm, MD and Arwa K. Aburizik, MD, MS
Decision-making capacity can be preserved in patients with mental illness and should be formally assessed in the context of their values and past decisions.
AMA J Ethics. 2017;19(5):444-453. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2017.19.5.ecas4-1705.
Is it ethical to create and advertise, either publicly or during office visits, package deals that offer patients an incentive to have procedures they are not already seeking and might not have considered?