Health information technology, like prior technological advances in medicine, can improve patient care and enhance the patient-physician relationship if used properly and thoughtfully.

A philosophical analysis of how physician actions and treatment goals are defined and interpreted and how understanding this process can affect the success of the clinical encounter.

Physician's view of what society expects of physicians and what physicians expect from society. Society demands accessible, quality care. Physicians want balanced lives.

The Catholic Church demonstrates a preferential option for the poor not only by providing charity but also by demanding justice for the poor.

The clinician/healer must both address the disease and seek to know how the medical condition is being experienced by the patient—what impact it has on his or her life and spirit.

The healer’s professional role and socioeconomic status from ancient to modern times.

Medicine, a high-energy consumer and generator of much waste—some of it toxic—must scale back the health care enterprise in the interest of preserving a livable environment.

Society values both the appropriate use of new technological and management innovations and the maintenance of a strong personal and therapeutic relationship between patients and physicians. The medical-home model may be able to accomplish both.

Physicians make patients aware of those interventions that they (the patients) may then refuse. In short, informed consent is less about patient decisions than it is about restraining physicians.

Given organ scarcity, transplantation programs state that patient promises of compliance cannot be taken at face value, excluding candidates who are deemed untrustworthy.