Although not everything on the Choosing Wisely lists is likely to reduce low-value care, it is a good starting point for a conversation about curtailing low-value interventions.
The ambiguity about and lack of uniformity in informed consent practices does not lend itself to the kind of shield from malpractice liability that exists in some more concrete, standardizable aspects of medical practice.
Is a residents' field trip to a museum a condescending waste of time or an opportunity to reconnect with the meaning of their work and hone their observational skills?
Carolyn Gaebler and Lisa Soleymani Lehmann, MD, PhD, MSc
The occasional required ethics course is not conveying to medical students that training institutions take ethics and the humanities seriously and consider them central to doctoring.
Timothy K. Mackey, MAS and Bryan A. Liang, MD, JD, PhD
Studies show that clinical practice guidelines, used by an accused physician or by patients alleging a breach of standard care, have an impact on case outcomes.
The Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine provides a scale for stratifying evidence from strongest to weakest on the basis of susceptibility to bias and the quality of study design.