Surgeons can have an impact on patients and communities that goes well beyond the operating room. This month on Ethics Talk, we discuss how the concept of "surgical justice" can help plastic surgeons deliver better care topatients and communities.

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

Author Ryan Sallans discusses his experience accessing health care and suggests how to take good gynecological care of transmen.

This month, AMA Journal of Ethics' theme editor Cameron Waldman, a second-year medical student at Albany Medical College, interviewed Aron Janssen, MD, about how healthcare professionals can better serve their transgender patients.

Dr Olivia Kates talks about appropriate use of antibiotics during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The experience of an English professor dying of ovarian cancer in Margaret Edson’s play Wit shows that both literary and medical discourse obfuscate and objectify rather than promote communication of “simple human truths” that dignify life and death.

Physicians’ ethical obligations to disclose conflicts of interest to patients and to obtain their informed consent for treatment are particularly critical when proposed treatments are experimental.

The authors of a recent journal article believe that most doctors and clinical trial sponsors would not object to changes in regulations requiring doctors to disclose financial incentives to their patients.

Protecting patients rather than informed consent should be the goal when the complexity of information overwhelms patients’ decision-making capacity.