Bioethicist Bruce Jennings examines the changing role of physicians in end-of-life care, from paternalistic decision maker to advisor-technician and half-way back.

Physicians do not have to give therapies or perform procedures that they judge to be futile and Catholic patients have the moral right to determine what is extraordinary or ordinary care.

The greatest pressure to resuscitate the extremely low-birth-weight infant often results from successful marketing efforts that lead families to expect that their premature infants will be cute and healthy.

Physicians need to educate patients about nutrition to counter the plethora of media images that promote poor dietary habits.

A digital record of place history and environmental context can provide a piece of clinically relevant information to help physicians understand what toxins patients may have been exposed to.

Until healthful food is widely affordable and accessible to all people, any discussions of how policy might infringe on the right to choose may be misguided.

Refusal of pediatric euthanasia can be considered iatrogenic insofar as it inadvertently prolongs patient suffering, but attitudes differ cross-culturally.

Clinician-family communication in surgical intensive care units should focus on reducing value incongruence and nonbeneficial operations.

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

Invisibility of racial inequity and gender inclusion in clinical research means key features of disease etiology and symptom presentation are unaccounted for.