Asking for forgiveness may be oppressive to a patient or family still grappling with the fact of the harm, the impact of the harm, and their own emotional response to the harm.
The picture that emerges from study of physician economic behavior is mixed, but from the intensity of responses by some professional societies to Medicare's coding modifier proposal, it appears that economic incentives matter a lot to many of their members.
Industrialized nations could benefit from strategies emerging in developing nations such as respectful collaboration between traditional out-of-hospital birthing practices and maternity units in partnering hospitals.
Refusal of pediatric euthanasia can be considered iatrogenic insofar as it inadvertently prolongs patient suffering, but attitudes differ cross-culturally.
AMA J Ethics. 2017;19(8):802-814. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2017.19.8.msoc1-1708.
This process of developing EBM-based guidelines and applying them to clinical care highlights the tension between generating unbiased knowledge based on statistical aggregation and the application of this information to individual patients.