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.

Clinicians can practice disability humility by developing social understandings of disability. This can help clinicians improve communication and express respect for patients’ authority about their experiences.

Understanding the religious background of patients and their surrogates is essential to providing patient-centered care at the end of life.

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

Physicians should provide women considering abortion after Down syndrome screening with unbiased information and not attempt to influence their decision.

Whether a patient’s decisional regret constitutes a failure of shared decision making can depend on how a decision was made.

Shared decision making honors patient autonomy, particularly for preference-sensitive care decisions and even when patients have impaired decision-making capacity.

Shared decision making in research informed consent conversations is complex due to diverse and potentially divergent interests of investigators and patient-subjects.

Drs Katrina Bramstedt and Ana Iltis discuss the development of QoL assessment tools to help patient-subjects considering reconstructive transplantation.

African cancer research is embedded in underresourced health care infrastructures, illuminating ethical questions about benefit sharing and governance.