Patient-physician concordance is a matter of degree. In certain circumstances, greater concordance can motivate important goals of medicine.

Transnational monitoring efforts should focus on safety, defining standard of care, and promoting just access to innovation.

Mission statements offer limited benefit when patients do not have meaningful choices about where to seek care and can be misused.

Health workers care for COVID-19 patients, just as St Roch tended to bubonic plague victims during the Renaissance. Three artworks relate Roch’s story and apply key insights to the 2020 pandemic.

Clinicians in Catholic health care institutions cannot prescribe contraceptives for pregnancy prevention under a false diagnosis without committing fraud and contravening doctrine. Referrals are one option the authors consider for navigating patient requests for contraception.

Using the patient’s worldview to challenge his or her decision and establish a treatment plan—implying the view is shared by the physician when it is not—could be seen as manipulative and deceptive.

An emerging medical ethics issue is whether to delay posting pathology reports to electronic health records (EHR) to allow clinicians time to follow up.

Law doesn’t always adequately address unauthorized uses of individuals’ DNA. Ethics can help establish legal privacy protections that work.

This photograph depicts a gateway at the Oud Sint-Janshospitaal, a medieval Flemish hospital.

The Catholic Health Association of the United States has chosen to allow the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services to supersede Pope John Paul II’s allocution on patients in a permanent vegetative state.