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.
Registries of those considered dangerous focus wrongly on those with mental illness, who account for only 4 percent of violent acts committed in the United States.
When ventilator support is being withdrawn from a dying child, responsive titration of sedative medications by the ICU team can relieve suffering without anesthetizing the child completely or hastening death.
Physicians are not obligated to offer testing or treatments that are not medically indicated—even if patients demand them. This does not mean, however, that a physician should be dismissive of the patient’s concerns.
Karen E. Hoffman, MD, MHSc, MPH and Paul L. Nguyen, MD
Guidelines require interpretation and should not be mindlessly applied as a template of care for all patients, particularly when there are inconsistencies between clinical practice guidelines developed by medical groups.
We should conduct empirical research to better understand how patients, parents, clinicians, and others grapple with the ethical challenges we confront when caring for children who are dying.
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.