Equating conscience with clinical judgment challenges the way that ethics is marginalized in medical education. Ethics is simply an account of what good medical practice looks like in particular situations.

The causes of many health behaviors are deeply rooted in our culture, and using a counseling model that assumes individual control and responsibility for these behaviors can cause patients to feel hectored instead of helped.

Patient-centered communication skills should be taught, practiced in simulation, and evaluated, just as technical skills are.

It is unclear whether the decreased risk of injury associated with prohibiting a teenage boy from playing football outweighs the benefits to his health and well-being of allowing him to participate.

Distinctions between treatment and enhancement, and between supposedly authentic and inauthentic tools, often inform judgments about what is morally acceptable in sport.

The default principle—that someone is free to do what he or she desires in the absence of a compelling reason why he or she should not—may make it possible to resolve ethical disputes without recourse to a particular moral framework.

A small but growing body of evidence suggests that worry about creating a burden on others is common among people who are near the end of life.

An adolescent patient with poor social support who has already lost one transplanted kidney due to complications of nonadherence may not automatically be inappropriate to list for a second transplant if he can prove his ability to adhere to the demands of a dialysis regimen.

Extending immunosuppressive drug coverage for the lifetime of kidney patients, instead of only covering dialysis, would be a cost-effective way for the federal government to reduce the costs of posttransplant care while improving clinical outcomes for patients.