In clinical settings, chaplains are key communicators who help mediate between patients, families, and the medical team. This month on Ethics Talk, we explore how chaplains help patients and families articulate their goals and navigate logistical and emotional challenges that arise in the hospital.
Undocumented patients in the United States with end-stage renal disease receive “compassionate” dialysis. Such patients oscillate between being marginally well and “ill enough” to receive dialysis while clinicians wrestle with complicity in a system that both offers and withholds life-saving therapy.
Allopathic clinicians should treat local health practitioners as equal partners in cross-cultural clinical practice and express respect for traditional therapies.
In treating children with autism, physicians should reframe the common dynamic in which the family wants medication that the doctor is withholding to focus instead on the family’s and physician’s share goal—the patient’s well-being.
Rachel A. Mills, MS, Susanne B. Haga, PhD, and Geoffrey S. Ginsburg, MD, PhD
Clinical utility is a test’s contribution to health outcomes, while personal utility considers the psychosocial and lifestyle effects and the value of the information to the patient.
Federal regulations governing egg donation fall into two categories: safety testing and truth in advertising. Neither deals directly with informed consent by, for example, specifying what information donors must be given.
Recommendation for induced lactation in nonbiological mothers is widespread in the medical literature. To resist offering the service for nongestating lesbian mothers bespeaks potential discrimination.