When patients are unable to express their wishes and do not have surrogates or advance directives, which and whose values should inform decision making for them? We discuss ethical complexities of caring for unrepresented patients.
AMA Journal of Ethics theme editor Karel-Bart Celie, a second-year medical student at Columbia University School of Medicine, interviewed Joseph J. Fins, MD, about the work of ethics committees and consultants as they pursue professionalization and respond to changes in health care organization and practice.
Scott J. Schweikart joins Ethics Talk to discuss his article, coauthored with Annika J. Penzer: “Using Policy and Law to Help Reduce Endometriosis Diagnostic Delay.”
Dr Ariane Lewis discusses how we can navigate uncertainty and ambiguity about brain death by understanding clinical criteria for brain death determination and how our approaches to death are culturally and socially situated.
Dr. Jones has a duty to determine how the test results were lost and why, disclose this information to his patient, Mrs. Taylor, and see that she is not held responsible for the costs of rerunning the test.
Physicians have a responsibility to assess elderly patients for conditions that could affect their ability to drive safely and to be familiar with state laws that govern physician duty to report impaired drivers.
Variations among physicians in diagnosis and X-ray interpretation, the percentages of which have remained essentially unchanged for five decades, raise serious ethical concerns.
