Preventing bad outcomes for teens and their offspring was the impetus behind confidential care for reproductive health. Requiring parental involvement created an obstacle to the provision of necessary care.
There is evidence that children who are unaware of their life-threatening diagnoses do not experience any less distress and anxiety than those who are told, and in some cases they may actually experience more.
The picture that emerges from study of physician economic behavior is mixed, but from the intensity of responses by some professional societies to Medicare's coding modifier proposal, it appears that economic incentives matter a lot to many of their members.
Treatment decisions in high-risk situations require a dynamic relationship between doctor and patient in which patient preferences and clinician recommendations contribute equally in shaping a final treatment decision.
This process of developing EBM-based guidelines and applying them to clinical care highlights the tension between generating unbiased knowledge based on statistical aggregation and the application of this information to individual patients.
AMA Journal of Ethics' editor Audiey Kao, MD, PhD, interviewed Kenneth Sands, MD, about harms to patient dignity caused by unintentional disrespect and about initiatives for measuring, tracking, and correcting such harms.