This commentary considers how to manage agitation in patients with dementia.

For dying patients and their loved ones to make informed decisions, physicians must share adequate information about prognoses, prospective benefits and harms of specific interventions, and costs.

Guidance about sedation to unconsciousness and medically ineffective interventions can be applied to surgical palliation.

Ethical dimensions of risk management are illuminated in AMA Code content on discharge planning.

Rather than relying on decision aids, values-based approaches to decision making illuminate a plurality of possible right actions.

Transplant physicians must respect indecisive patients’ autonomy while continuing to educate them during their progress towards transplantation.

Patients’ rights to evidence-based standard of care should not be compromised for patients who are incarcerated.

Los derechos de los pacientes a un estándar de atención basado en evidencia no deben verse comprometidos en el caso de los pacientes encarcelados.

Los antecedentes de encarcelamiento se suman a la complejidad clínica y ética de la atención quirúrgica de los pacientes que requieren una ostomía, especialmente cuando es secundaria a un traumatismo.