US attitudes toward aging drive patient demands for elective medical and surgical services. Ethical physicians must make sure patients have realistic expectations.

Clinical case and commentary on how physicians should respond when confronted by medication requests from parents of children with mood and concentration disorders.

A look at Pamela Bjorkland’s critique of the use of psychoactive drugs to improve mood, a practice known as cosmetic psychopharmacology.

Though body size can be altered with environmental or behavioral changes, anatomic shape, which appears to be genetically determined, cannot be changed except by surgery, trauma, or illness.

The clinician/healer must both address the disease and seek to know how the medical condition is being experienced by the patient—what impact it has on his or her life and spirit.

A look through the eyes of an emergency room physician in Baghdad at a 5-year-old boy who died for his grandfather’s religious beliefs.

The range of opinions on the extent to which physicians should attend to their patients’ spiritual lives and the arguments that support those opinions.

The range of opinions on the extent to which physicians should attend to their patients’ spiritual lives and the arguments that support those opinions.

The range of opinions on the extent to which physicians should attend to their patients’ spiritual lives and the arguments that support those opinions.