For many physicians, lack of understanding about brain death leads to confusion and muddles interactions with patients’ loved ones at the end of life.

Since 1995, the American Academy of Neurology has provided guidelines for brain death determination, but nationwide adherence to these guidelines has been incomplete.

Lobbying, maintaining diagnostic skill, participating in national societies, and contributing to robust discourse can influence practice and policy.

Criteria in statutes and tests used to diagnose brain death don’t always jibe, and this can undermine public trust in death pronouncements.

Dr Ariane Lewis discusses how we can navigate uncertainty and ambiguity about brain death by understanding clinical criteria for brain death determination and how our approaches to death are culturally and socially situated.

Adhering too strictly to biomedical thinking about diagnosis can prevent clinicians from empathically engaging with patients and helping them navigate their illness experiences.

The harms of communicating autism risk can be avoided by helping families to understand risk and to distinguish between poor and good sources of scientific information, which should take families’ interests into account.

Because many complementary and alternative medicine therapies for autism are based on misguided notions of its cause and lack support from scientifically sound studies, physicians should steer parents away from these practices and toward safe, effective, and evidence-based interventions.

The early diagnosis of Alzheimer disease is a boon in that it enables advance planning, but that planning process can engender conflict between respect for future-oriented autonomy and future welfare.