A new Virginia law governing collaborations between nurse practitioners and doctors leaves unresolved key legal issues in team-based care, including those pertaining to medical malpractice and liability and anticompetitive practices.
When psychiatrists must submit evaluations of their patients in legal settings, they must provide complete and factual accounts even if the patient's attorneys would rather redact some information.
The belief persists that patient satisfaction surveys are more responsive to friendliness and expensive facilities than clinician interaction, but there is evidence to the contrary.
Physicians will have a greater impact on health if they advocate for changes needed to prevent illness and harm than if they simply patch up those who are sick or harmed.
By virtue of their education and expertise, physicians have a responsibility to challenge scientifically inaccurate information about sexual health, but they may not opine about sexual norms for society in their professional capacity.
Physicians have a duty to educate lawmakers and the public about misinformation but they should not advocate for specific policies and thereby foreclose social dialogue on issues related to public health.
Despite the natural desire in obstetrics for a happy outcome, sometimes the common aggressive interventions will not help maintain a pregnancy until viability.
Publicizing physician ordering information as a way of peer-pressuring hospital employees into cutting costs is likely to have unintended consequences.