AMA Journal of Ethics

Decision making in health care demands that we balance multiple considerations, like quality of life, statistics, and how different options could affect others. Dr Brian Zikmund-Fisher shares his own experience as a patient and explains how decision science can help us navigate ethically complex health decisions.  

How information is provided can change a choice. Decision science helps reveal affective forecasting errors and can generate choices congruent with patients’ and families’ values.

Prognostic uncertainty about risk creates demand for ongoing communication and facilitated reflection about goals and values.

Despite challenges of decision making for unrepresented patients, few laws or policy statements offer solutions. This article offers 5 key things to do.

Prevention efforts can marginalize patients by stigmatizing certain behaviors, so distinguishing individual professionals’ preferences about those behaviors is critical.

A “simplicity strategy” suggests expressing respect for persons and empathy and models inclusive group inquiry, epistemic humility, and justice.

When an unproven intervention is a nanodrug, a physician’s role is especially difficult due to possibilities of unprecedented harms.

Childbirth in hospitals settings is considered by some to be medicalized and not natural. When medicalization is associated with loss of autonomy and control, clinicians should be aware of how they express respect for women during in-hospital births.

Labels commonly used in clinical settings, like “elective” or “therapeutic,” influence how we think about the justifiability of abortion. We talk with Professor Katie Watson and Dr Maryl Sackeim about how the language clinicians use to describe abortion can affect patients’ experiences and even cause harm.

Distinguishing between elective and therapeutic abortions undermines the moral agency of patients and disproportionately amplifies moral rather than medical dimensions of the procedure.