Dr Cynthia Geppert joins Ethics Talk to discuss how teaching health professions students and trainees about palliative psychiatry reinvigorates core philosophy of medicine investigations into what health care is for.
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.
When called to consult or to testify at “sexually violent predator” hearings, medical professionals’ primary task is adapting recognized medical terminology to the SVP label; they are asked to shoehorn medical diagnoses into ill-fitting legal language.
Addicts quickly learn the diagnoses that cannot be definitively confirmed or ruled out by examinations or test results but that elicit prescriptions for opioid pain management.
This month, AMA Journal of Ethics theme editor Sarah Waliany, a fourth-year medical student at Stanford University School of Medicine, interviewed Louise Andrew, MD, JD, about mental health challenges for physicians and medical students and some strategies for colleagues to assist and intervene.