Calls to expand palliative care education have been explicit since the 1990s, but palliative care training in surgery remains too narrowly focused on end of life.

Priorities far beyond generating morbidity or mortality data are needed to improve patients’ experiences, innovate metrics, and advance surgical palliation as a field.

Guidance about sedation to unconsciousness and medically ineffective interventions can be applied to surgical palliation.

Seeming incongruity between surgery and palliation reiterates patients’ needs for clinicians to be able to identify when and how they should coexist.

Some clinicians offering image-guided procedures have little training in palliative medicine, which is both a clinical and an ethical problem.

Using social media tools in health-related research involves challenges to confidentiality, privacy, and consent.

Dr Travis Rieder discusses his own experiences with opioids and the ethical challenges of “legacy patients,” and Dr Stephanie Zaza, president of the American College of Preventive Medicine, discusses the future of opioid research priorities.

Physicians need better education in nutrition science. Referring patients to nutrition experts for dietary counseling would motivate food availability and intake assessment as routine. Good clinical counseling considers patients' cultural traditions and environmental sustainability as key ethical values.

Large precision health initiatives like the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us campaign raise important ethical questions about consent, privacy, and inclusivity. This month on Ethics Talk, we explore with Dr Katie Johansen Taber and Ysabel Duron strategies for protecting participants and ensuring that diverse communities are represented.

Undocumented patients can be subject to discrimination, reporting, detention, or deportation in violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, so what goes in the record is critical.