Teaching high-value care requires curricular aids, faculty training, dialogue and teamwork among residents and supervising faculty, and evaluating attending physicians on their practice and teaching of high-value care.

We must try to understand why there is such certainty about poor prognosis in severe brain-injury cases, when in fact many patients recover, albeit to a level of function most of us would not desire.

The default principle—that someone is free to do what he or she desires in the absence of a compelling reason why he or she should not—may make it possible to resolve ethical disputes without recourse to a particular moral framework.

A small but growing body of evidence suggests that worry about creating a burden on others is common among people who are near the end of life.

When a patient is turfed, the interdisciplinary relationships take on the characteristics of a power play. In medicine, duties to patients are paramount, and some physicians appear to consider themselves in some ways exempt from that duty.

The author argues that long-term trends point to a future for physician assistants and nurse practitioners as the principal front-line deliverers of primary care, with physicians focusing on managerial duties and specialty care.

Because the number of patients undergoing genetic testing is increasing, medical staff should be conscientious about their patients' potential needs for genetic counseling and be ready to advise patients on communicating their diagnoses to at-risk family members or refer them to genetic counselors.

Media coverage of a sympathetic person's illness experience can trigger changes in public opinion and even public policy.

We must expand our efforts to integrate humanities training into premedical programs and graduate medical education.

Narrative ethics derives its ethical force from continually comparing and critiquing new narratives against existing narratives that guide the way we live.