The American College of Physicians and the Federation of State Medical Boards’ guidelines for online medical professionalism apply existing norms of communication and confidentiality to new settings but will need to be modified in light of technological advances and unanswered questions.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(5):441-447. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.5.nlit1-1505.
Physician employment adds a practice management stakeholder to the patient-physician encounter, a stakeholder whose financial interests differ from those of physicians in solo or group practice.
Equating conscience with clinical judgment challenges the way that ethics is marginalized in medical education. Ethics is simply an account of what good medical practice looks like in particular situations.
Narrative ethics derives its ethical force from continually comparing and critiquing new narratives against existing narratives that guide the way we live.
Frank A. Chervenak, MD and Laurence B. McCullough, PhD
A patient’s request for a treatment does not establish that treatment as medically reasonable according to evidence-based deliberative clinical judgment.
Julian Savulescu's writing on conscientious objection is guided by an emphasis on the principle of distributive justice that does not allow religion to have a special status as justification.
Publicizing physician ordering information as a way of peer-pressuring hospital employees into cutting costs is likely to have unintended consequences.