Oliver Schirokauer, PhD, MD, Thomas A. Tallman, DO, MMM, Leah Jeunnette, PhD, Despina Mavrakis, MBA, and Monica L. Gerrek, PhD
An educational initiative is described in which medical and bioethics students observe health care in an urban jail for two days and reflect on their learning.
In the same way that we learn about normal variations in blood pressure, we need to learn about “normal” variations in sexual interests and practices. We want to avoid clueless questions or unintentionally inflammatory statements.
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.
After assessing the reasons for a patient’s unrealistic hopefulness in the face of clear understanding, a clinician may believe that significant harm will come to the patient if he or she does not acknowledge the seriousness of the illness.
Developing technologies for personalized medicine may be misused to popularize the idea that one can infer a person’s genetic makeup from observer-defined or self-reported assignment to a race or ethnic group.
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.