When ventilator support is being withdrawn from a dying child, responsive titration of sedative medications by the ICU team can relieve suffering without anesthetizing the child completely or hastening death.
David S. Gierada, MD and Lawrence M. Kotner, Jr., MD
Despite strong supportive evidence on and professional society endorsement of CT screening for lung cancer, there is minimal demand from patients or physicians.
Amidst discussions of how to maximize physician contributions in high-risk disaster situations, the author asks if doctors are actually duty-bound to contribute at all.
A bioethicist argues that two journal articles about quality of life-adjusted years research oversimplifies the issue and do not take into consideration people's abilities to adapt to disability and disease.
A health economics professor believes more research is needed on quality of life-adjusted years to explore the way we describe health states, the elicitation of patient values, and how to develop methods for obtaining informed general population preferences.
Elly A. Stolk, MSc and Floortje E. van Nooten, MSc
Two medical technology researchers argue that patients' own valuations of their health states may result in devaluation of interventions that can help them.
The American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force on the Family recommends that pediatricians take a more active role in helping to insure that the family environment is conducive to a child's emotional and physical well-being.