Shelley Wall, MBChB, Nikki Allorto, MBChB, Ross Weale, MBBS, Victor Kong, PhD, and Damian Clarke, PhD
Caring for severe burn injuries in low- and middle-income countries requires making decisions about resource allocation given particular contextual factors.
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(6):575-580. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2018.20.6.msoc1-1806.
Those in prison are less healthy than the general population, are far more likely to have engaged in high-risk behaviors that can result in organ damage, disease and disability, and age more rapidly than nonincarcerated individuals do.
This case illustrates how emergency physicians find themselves with an empty toolbox and must compromise to meet their responsibilities to patients and themselves.
When a child or family begins to stand out because of patterns in history or physical findings, physicians must determine whether to take a closer look at the situation.
The greatest pressure to resuscitate the extremely low-birth-weight infant often results from successful marketing efforts that lead families to expect that their premature infants will be cute and healthy.
A major contributor to the lack of medicines in developing countries is an intellectual property regime that allows proprietary drug companies with intellectual property monopolies to charge high prices and maximize profit.
Physicians new to a case might object to an established care plan. Practice variation, clinical momentum, and how value is assigned by different parties to acute care and comfort measures can each contribute to conflict in these cases.
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(8):E699-707. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2018.699.
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.
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(8):E778-779. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2018.778.