Immigrant patients are often bewildered when they need to seek health care in the U.S., and that care usually comes from physicians who are unsympathetic to their plight.
Medical malpractice pits the legal system's ethics of client advocacy against the medical profession's ethics of patient advocacy. Fear of liability may lead to defensive medicine, an aberration of both professions' intent.
Physicians have a duty to learn the facts and use their medical expertise to allay patients' fears rather than order unnecessary tests when a certain disease or condition receives a great deal of media coverage.
Mark T. Hughes, MD, MA and Bimal H. Ashar, MD, MBA
Physicians are urged to evaluate an asymptomatic patient's request for CT screening and use the opportunity to educate the patient and determine the course of action that is in the patient's best interest.
An undercurrent in all debates about allocation of health care resources to the poor is the matter of access to and coverage of health care for immigrants, particularly low-income and undocumented ones.
There is evidence that children who are unaware of their life-threatening diagnoses do not experience any less distress and anxiety than those who are told, and in some cases they may actually experience more.