Given the well-established correlation across cultures between poverty and unhealthy lifestyles, can it be just to hold individuals responsible for choices typical of their socioeconomic sector? Aren’t patient-responsibility programs simply conspiracies to shrink benefits to the poor?
The clinician/healer must both address the disease and seek to know how the medical condition is being experienced by the patient—what impact it has on his or her life and spirit.
Undocumented patients in the United States with end-stage renal disease receive “compassionate” dialysis. Such patients oscillate between being marginally well and “ill enough” to receive dialysis while clinicians wrestle with complicity in a system that both offers and withholds life-saving therapy.
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(8):E778-779. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2018.778.
An emerging medical ethics issue is whether to delay posting pathology reports to electronic health records (EHR) to allow clinicians time to follow up.
AMA J Ethics. 2016;18(8):826-832. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2016.18.8.pfor1-1608.
Long-acting injectables powerfully augment HIV care, but broad acceptance and uptake could be compromised by what we know about experiences with antipsychotics.
AMA J Ethics. 2021;23(5):E405-409. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2021.405.
Rayner Kay Jin Tan, Jane Mingjie Lim, MSW, and Jeremiah Kah Wai Chan, MSc
Merits and drawbacks of U = U messaging are ethically and clinically complex, and drawbacks could harm patients in whom viral suppression is hard to achieve.
AMA J Ethics. 2021;23(5):E418-422. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2021.418.