AMA Journal of Ethics^®

This comic conveys the absurdity of overreliance on symptom measures and excessive testing in contemporary clinical decision making and health care practice.

Considering chronic opioid use when planning elective surgery would likely enhance team communication, decrease stigma, and facilitate care transitioning and long-term planning.

HPV tests are alternatives to Pap smear screening that enable women to self-collect specimens and might be the best cervical cancer prevention strategy for many.

Two concerns (unknowability of how output is derived from input and overreliance on clinical decision support systems) are main sources of ethical questions about AI in health care.

Trafficking-specific ICD-10-CM codes account for physical, social, and psychological dimensions of trafficked patients’ experiences. Data collected by clinicians can also motivate improvements in health policy, resource allocation, and prevention.

Perhaps machine learning systems trained on patients’ electronic health records and social media footprints could be used as decision aids when patients lack capacity or face overwhelming decisions.

Pathologists should work cooperatively with clinicians and provide guidance about appropriate testing to uphold the medical ethics principle of justice.

This month, AMA Journal of Ethics editor-in-chief Audiey Kao, MD, PhD, interviewed Wendy Levinson, MD, about the efforts of the Choosing Wisely initiative to foster cultural change in medicine cross-nationally by stimulating dialogue about overuse of tests and treatments

Countering the prevailing thought that more medical testing and treatment is always better can be achieved by creating a forum for open discussion of costs and value to prevent patient harm from overuse.

In Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., the Supreme Court ruled that synthetically created DNA is patentable, but the isolation of unaltered gene sequences is not.