We must not pit immigration policy and health care needs against one another. We need better policy on immigration, and that policy should confront immigration at the workplace and at the border—not in the hospital emergency room.
Critical skills required to weigh decisions with serious consequences, manipulate information rationally, and choose wisely are skills that are likely to be impaired by frontal lobe injury that results in personality change.
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.
Physicians make patients aware of those interventions that they (the patients) may then refuse. In short, informed consent is less about patient decisions than it is about restraining physicians.
Katherine Gentry, MD, MA and Aaron Wightman, MD, MA
A patient’s refusal of tracheostomy during an anticipated difficult intubation prompts critical questions about how to best express respect for a pediatric patient’s autonomy and whether and when deviation from standard of care is clinically and ethically appropriate.
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(8):E683-689. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2018.683.
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.
Giving undocumented immigrants and those with DACA status (DREAMers) access to health care and medical education enables them to contribute to these systems.
AMA J Ethics. 2017;19(3):221-233. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2017.19.3.peer1-1703.