When a seriously ill mature minor and his parent disagree about his receiving an experimental intervention, who should decide what treatment he will receive?
When a seriously ill mature minor and his parent disagree about his receiving an experimental intervention, who should decide what treatment he will receive?
Even seasoned doctors can have trouble confronting the topic of death. For medical students, training and role modeling are needed to make them valuable to patients facing death.
Situations in which the patient’s family seems not to be acting in good faith or the patient's suffering is uncontrollable are relatively rare and do not warrant giving physicians unilateral power to withhold or withdraw treatment in all cases of perceived medical futility.
Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD and Dorothy E. Roberts, JD
The call for structural competency encourages medicine to broaden its approach to matters of race and culture so that it might better address both individual-level doctor and patient characteristics and institutional factors.
The use of coded patient data for reimbursement purposes can tempt clinicians to exaggerate the severity of the patient's condition, skewing the accuracy of the data and interfering with clinical decision support and research.
When a patient requests an unfamiliar treatment, the physician should not hesitate to research it before giving a categorical reply about its safety or efficacy.
Rachel O. Reid, MD, MS and Ateev Mehrotra, MD, MPH
An effective policy regarding retail clinics in a primary care practice should address patients' need for timely and convenient acute care and build capacity for enhanced access to acute care within the primary care clinic itself.