AMA Journal of Ethics

A lack of consensus guidelines or a belief that current evidence does not support such guidelines might be justified if a clinician expresses a commitment to patient-centered care and shared decision making.

Testing everyone for everything identifies more fetal conditions, but confusion persists about whether clinicians should leave screening decisions to patients.

Facial transplantation must establish approaches to assessing QoL in candidates and recipients that use meaningful outcomes.

Recent advances in UTx suggest it is on a trajectory toward becoming an accepted clinical practice to treat absolute uterine factor infertility.

Current QoL conversations in HTx could be enhanced by a phenomenological account of temporality, embodiment, and intersubjectivity.

Despite drawbacks of immunosuppression and surgery, vascularized composite allotransplants can enhance lives of patients who meet candidacy criteria and are well supported.

Improving candidate evaluation and informed consent is key to motivating authenticity, not just voluntariness.

Ethical and practical problems with preference modeling can undermine how reliably predictors can be used in high-stakes decisions.

Anesthesiologists regularly take breaks during operations, but surgeons do so rarely. Current literature describes the influence of breaks on attention, focus, and stamina.

Drs Katrina Bramstedt and Ana Iltis discuss the development of QoL assessment tools to help patient-subjects considering reconstructive transplantation.