Richard L. Kravitz, MD, MSPH and Jodi Halpern, MD, PhD
Patients have a responsibility to discerningly present the drug information they receive from direct-to-consumer advertising and to be active partners with their physician in making health care decisions.
Mark T. Hughes, MD, MA and Bimal H. Ashar, MD, MBA
Physicians are urged to evaluate an asymptomatic patient's request for CT screening and use the opportunity to educate the patient and determine the course of action that is in the patient's best interest.
Physicians are cautioned that the two obstacles to reforming post-marketing clinical trials are the FDA's reluctance to revisit past approvals and its inability to enforce pharmaceutical companies' commitment to conduct Phase IV trials.
Physicians need to exhaust every possible alternative to bring about political changes before resorting to breaking the law as an act of civil disobedience.
Physicians need to exhaust every possible alternative to bring about political changes before resorting to breaking the law as an act of civil disobedience.
Physicians need to perform their due diligence and practice caution when prescribing addictive pain medications to relieve their patients' chronic pain due to increased federal monitoring of pain prescriptions.
An undercurrent in all debates about allocation of health care resources to the poor is the matter of access to and coverage of health care for immigrants, particularly low-income and undocumented ones.