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.
This month theme issue editor, Trahern Jones, a fourth-year student at Mayo Medical School in Rochester, Minnesota, spoke with Dr. Edward Laskowski about the use of performance-enhancing drugs and substances among athletes today.
Darryl C. Abrams, MD, Kenneth Prager, MD, Craig D. Blinderman, MD, Kristin M. Burkart, MD, MSc, and Daniel Brodie, MD
The medical community should formulate guidelines for appropriate use of organ-replacement therapies, taking into consideration the resources involved and the clinical expectation that the therapy can serve as a bridge to recovery or transplantation or can be a destination therapy.
Jalayne J. Arias, JD, MA and Kathryn L. Weise, MD, MA
Even when external factors such as nonaccidental injury weigh heavily on clinicians' perceptions, they should not lose focus on the patient's best interest when deciding whether to continue or withdraw treatment.
Balancing parents' rights to raise their children and a state's duty to protect children is no easy task. Even though most states have religious exemptions to child abuse or neglect laws, courts have ruled in favor of both parents and states, depending on the circumstances.
Is it ethical to create and advertise, either publicly or during office visits, package deals that offer patients an incentive to have procedures they are not already seeking and might not have considered?
Forcing parents to participate in treatment is unlikely to succeed. Seeking to optimize the therapeutic alliance between family and pediatrician is more likely to achieve the desired outcome—the child’s short- and long-term well-being.
Within the patient-physician relationship, the request for neuroenhancement becomes a chief concern, and the physician has a duty to take a history and perform a physical exam to determine whether the patient’s current level of function represents significant change.
Some question whether plastic surgeons bear responsibility for promoting suspect norms of beauty, given that certain types of cosmetic enhancements reinforce common conceptions of normality that are harmful to society.