Clinicians must avoid violating professional ethical principles and patients’ legal rights and they may not ever discriminate. So, what does that mean in practice?

This drawing portrays 3 perspectives on deliberate emergent dialysis for undocumented immigrants with kidney disease.

This brief visual and narrative history explains why dentistry exists outside medicine, rather than as a specialty within it.

Transnational violence has been created by international policy, militaristic interventions, and multinational organizational administration of border operations.

No single person should make decisions about for whom or according to which criteria palliative surgery is clinically and ethically appropriate.

When surgical intervention is most appropriate, success should be defined by how well a surgical intervention aligns with a patient’s goals.

For some patients whose survival is extended by disease-modifying interventions, little guidance about clinical and ethical complexities exist.

Calls to expand palliative care education have been explicit since the 1990s, but palliative care training in surgery remains too narrowly focused on end of life.

Guidance about sedation to unconsciousness and medically ineffective interventions can be applied to surgical palliation.

Seeming incongruity between surgery and palliation reiterates patients’ needs for clinicians to be able to identify when and how they should coexist.