Dr Charles E. Binkley joins Ethics Talk to discuss his article: "How Should Surgeons Communicate About Palliative and Curative Intentions, Purposes, and Outcomes?"

Drs Pringl Miller, Preeti John, and Sabha Ganai join Ethics Talk to discuss their article: “How Should Surgical Palliative Success Be Defined?”

A patient’s transition from “living” to “dying” is not socially marked in the same way death is marked, and this is both clinically and ethically relevant.

A surgeon’s duty is to identify goals of care, including those about quality of life, from a patient’s perspective and to consider how to achieve them.

Word usage and intentional clarity will influence how patients feel about that Whipple pancreaticoduodenectomy surgery.

Empathic communication skills help motivate understanding of safety, significance of harms, impact on succeeding generations, and social consequences.

Transnational monitoring efforts should focus on safety, defining standard of care, and promoting just access to innovation.

Ethical and practical problems with preference modeling can undermine how reliably predictors can be used in high-stakes decisions.

For dying patients and their loved ones to make informed decisions, physicians must share adequate information about prognoses, prospective benefits and harms of specific interventions, and costs.

Protecting patients rather than informed consent should be the goal when the complexity of information overwhelms patients’ decision-making capacity.