What can comic art about illness and health care offer patients and families as they navigate health challenges? This month on Ethics Talk, we discuss why comic art is a unique and powerful medium for communicating about difficult and emotional encounters with illness and health care.

Physicians should recognize that patients’ beliefs may cause them to have non-medical explanations for their illnesses and that shared explanations should be negotiated if treatment plans are to be successful.

Pairing medical students with chronically ill community volunteers for 2 years helps those students gain appreciation for the experience of illness, develop self-reflection and perspective-taking, and learn to communicate with people who may be quite unlike them.

Medical students and residents should be taught clear principles to help them educate families about their children's nutritional requirements from the age of birth in order to prevent childhood obesity.

Physicians should extend gender-affirming treatment to gender-nonconforming people, who experience discrimination and health disparities.

Pain management of adult and pediatric burn patients should be individualized and include nonpharmacological treatment.

Physicians should use evidence-based guidelines as a starting point to make sound clinical treatment decisions for a patient's individual medical needs.

Physicians should use evidence-based guidelines as a starting point to make sound clinical treatment decisions for a patient's individual medical needs.

Physicians should use evidence-based guidelines as a starting point to make sound clinical treatment decisions for a patient's individual medical needs.

The authors address the medical ethics question of whether autopsy is necessary from Cartesian and sociocultural perspectives and how to obtain consent.