When patients request drugs for nonmedical reasons, the most effective intervention may be to explore with the patient his or her reasons for using drugs to make lifestyle changes.
Medical technology presents a new ethical question in the case of a patient with a left ventricular assist device who, when informed that he has pneumonia and is ineligible for a heart transplant, asks that the LVAD be turned off.
Physicians have an obligation to consider a patient’s quality of life when making treatment decisions and should consider giving patients the options of withholding or withdrawing aggressive treatment if that treatment will not restore the kind of life the patient finds meaningful.
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.
Chris Feudtner, MD, PhD, MPH, David Munson, MD, and Wynne Morrison, MD
The way that we choose how to frame the conversation with parents about halting or continuing such therapy for their children who will not recover has special importance in medicine and in society.
Frank A. Chervenak, MD and Laurence B. McCullough, PhD
Clinical facts and physicians’ ethical obligations are critical in resolving disagreements between parents and physicians about resuscitation of an extremely premature infant.
Physicians and surrogates should take patients' preferences into account in making clinical intervention decisions, even if the patients have been found to lack decision-making capacity.
Physicians and surrogates should take patients' preferences into account in making clinical intervention decisions, even if the patients have been found to lack decision-making capacity.