Colonel Paul F. Pasquina, USA (Ret), MD, Antonio J. Carvalho, and Terrence Patrick Sheehan, MD
Health outcomes for people who have had amputations are affected not only by barriers to access, such as race, socioeconomic status and cost, but also by the type of facility where they receive treatment and rehabilitative services.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(6):535-546. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.6.stas1-1506
Levan Atanelov, MD, MS, Steven A. Stiens, MD, MS, and Mark A. Young, MD, MBA
Physical medicine and rehabilitation has developed into a medical specialty that aims to restore optimal patient function in multiple dimensions of life with an interdisciplinary approach to care delivery.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(6):568-574. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.6.mhst1-1506.
Framing discussions of ALS around the disease rather than the psychologically complex person with the disease focuses attention on symptoms and imagined outcomes rather than patients’ coping strategies and quality of life.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(6):530-534. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.6.nlit2-1506.
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.
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.
Conflicts between federal and state laws governing marijuana, lack of evidence about its efficacy as a treatment, and physicians' inability to predict or control dosage would all be aided by reclassification of the drug that would let clinical research go forward.
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.
Those who care for adolescents must advocate for timely disclosure of HIV diagnosis since the negative effects of late disclosure include social isolation, anxiety, loss of trust, and depression.
Some question whether plastic surgeons bear responsibility for promoting suspect norms of beauty, given that certain types of cosmetic enhancements reinforce common conceptions of normality that are harmful to society.