Research in the PED and PICU is essential to medical understanding of the efficacy of emergency interventions. Researchers must minimize the additional stress that consent and participation in research entail for pediatric patients and their families.
Volk v DeMeerleer may conflict with professional guidelines regarding physicians’ obligations to breach patient confidentiality to protect third parties.
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(1):10-18. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2018.20.1.peer2-1801.
Eitan Neidich, Alon B. Neidich, David A. Axelrod, MD, and John P. Roberts, MD
Geographic disparities in availability of organs for transplant have spawned for-profit companies that help patients get on waitlists in more than one region and arrange travel for them if an organ becomes available.
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.
Amy Barnhorst, MD, Garen Wintemute, MD, MPH, and Marian E. Betz, MD, MPH
When mandatory reporting of risk of violence is not required, physicians should balance patient autonomy and beneficence with patient and public safety.
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(1):29-35. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2018.20.1.ecas1-1801.
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.