The belief persists that patient satisfaction surveys are more responsive to friendliness and expensive facilities than clinician interaction, but there is evidence to the contrary.
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.
An attempt to investigate correlations between race, attitudes, and contraceptive use did not find meaningful associations between race and attitudes about birth control or pregnancy that could influence contraceptive choice.
If employees of religious institutions whose consciences conflict with those of their employers were to be granted legal protection for positive claims of conscience, the religious freedom of institutions within which they work would be gravely compromised.
Movements to deinstitutionalize people with mental illness and to make institutionalization more legally difficult have resulted in a lack of space and resources for the care of those with severe mental illness, and many have ended up in jails and prisons.
When a patient requests an unfamiliar treatment, the physician should not hesitate to research it before giving a categorical reply about its safety or efficacy.
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?
Within the patient-physician relationship, the request for neuroenhancement becomes a chief concern, and the physician has a duty to take a history and perform a physical exam to determine whether the patient’s current level of function represents significant change.