A medical student’s desire to practice the specialty that he or she finds most interesting should not outweigh the right of patients in a pluralistic society to receive a full range of legal medical services.
A consensus has emerged that the paternalism behind use of the provocative saline infusion test for nonepileptic seizures cannot be justified because the harms to the patient, the physician, and their relationship exceed the benefits.
With good planning and good will, medical professionals’ right of conscience and patients’ rights to controversial services can be both protected and accommodated.
A review of research that found that physicians disciplined by state medical boards were as much as three times more likely than controls to have had a record of unprofessional behavior in medical school.
Suggests to medical students what forms of self-disclosure are acceptable during clinical encounters and when self-disclosure might be interpreted by patients as taking attention away from them.