Graphic pathographies can illustrate how overreliance on statistics can obscure the clinical relevance of patients’ experiences of anxiety when they’re presented with prognoses.

Therapeutic misconception—a false belief that individuals will benefit from participating in research—can bias informed consent. Ethics consultants can help by engaging participants’ and researchers’ understandings of risks and benefits and by asking good questions about the influences of researchers’ enthusiasm.

When an unproven intervention is a nanodrug, a physician’s role is especially difficult due to possibilities of unprecedented harms.

How information is provided can change a choice. Decision science helps reveal affective forecasting errors and can generate choices congruent with patients’ and families’ values.

Decision making in health care demands that we balance multiple considerations, like quality of life, statistics, and how different options could affect others. Dr Brian Zikmund-Fisher shares his own experience as a patient and explains how decision science can help us navigate ethically complex health decisions.  

Clinician-researchers deeply invested in data gathering are still obliged to respect a patient-subject’s right to stop being in research.

The University of Michigan Medical School (UMMS) implemented a major curriculum revision to incorporate patient- and family-centered care concepts.

McMaster University’s medical school curriculum promotes compassionate, person-centered care by incorporating the views of persons with disabilities.

Pain management of adult and pediatric burn patients should be individualized and include nonpharmacological treatment.

A “simplicity strategy” suggests expressing respect for persons and empathy and models inclusive group inquiry, epistemic humility, and justice.