The AAP’s guidelines on lipid screening for children raise concerns about the fundamental purpose of prevention and its role in balancing individual autonomy with the benefits of society at large.
Society values both the appropriate use of new technological and management innovations and the maintenance of a strong personal and therapeutic relationship between patients and physicians. The medical-home model may be able to accomplish both.
Given the well-established correlation across cultures between poverty and unhealthy lifestyles, can it be just to hold individuals responsible for choices typical of their socioeconomic sector? Aren’t patient-responsibility programs simply conspiracies to shrink benefits to the poor?
Undocumented patients in the United States with end-stage renal disease receive “compassionate” dialysis. Such patients oscillate between being marginally well and “ill enough” to receive dialysis while clinicians wrestle with complicity in a system that both offers and withholds life-saving therapy.
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(8):E778-779. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2018.778.
Social and behavioral data contained in electronic health records are essential for studying health disparities. Can researchers avoid bias when collecting, analyzing, and using such data?
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(9):E873-880. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2018.873.
The objective is to compare the costs of providing the same level of quality. When resource-use and quality measures are juxtaposed, the resources used to provide the same level of quality can be compared.