My most important job is to help my patients (and their families) who are depressed, grieving, or angry following severe injury or illness to imagine possible narratives for the next chapter of life.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(6):500-505. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.6.ecas1-1506.
Lloyd Duplechan joins Ethics Talk to discuss his article: "How High Reliability Can Facilitate Clinical, Organizational, and Public Health Responses to Global Ecological Health Risks.”
Dr Esha Bansal joins Ethics Talk to discuss her article, coauthored with Drs Saran Kunaprayoon and Linda P. Zhang: “Opportunities for Global Health Diplomacy in Transnational Robotic Telesurgery.”
Research is often conducted without the knowledge or consent of those whose tissues are banked and poses possible harms to social groups if information about a few members is unscientifically applied to all.
The U. S. health care system encourages patients to take more responsibility for their own treatment decisions and expects their doctors to cooperate in that effort. But the guidelines for exercising that responsibility remain very murky indeed.
The legal definition of a patient and the corresponding duties of the physician have been debated in state courts for over a century, and many aspects of the question are still unresolved.