AMA Journal of Ethics^®

This photograph depicts a gateway at the Oud Sint-Janshospitaal, a medieval Flemish hospital.

Health workers care for COVID-19 patients, just as St Roch tended to bubonic plague victims during the Renaissance. Three artworks relate Roch’s story and apply key insights to the 2020 pandemic.

Mission statements offer limited benefit when patients do not have meaningful choices about where to seek care and can be misused.

Patient-physician concordance is a matter of degree. In certain circumstances, greater concordance can motivate important goals of medicine.

Clinicians in Catholic health care institutions cannot prescribe contraceptives for pregnancy prevention under a false diagnosis without committing fraud and contravening doctrine. Referrals are one option the authors consider for navigating patient requests for contraception.

Clinicians should strive to see the dignity and humanity in patients characterized as “difficult” from a psychoanalytic perspective.

If employees of religious institutions whose consciences conflict with those of their employers were to be granted legal protection for positive claims of conscience, the religious freedom of institutions within which they work would be gravely compromised.

Equating conscience with clinical judgment challenges the way that ethics is marginalized in medical education. Ethics is simply an account of what good medical practice looks like in particular situations.

For physicians who morally oppose assisted reproduction, NaProTECHNOLOGY offers an alternative set of treatments for infertility.

A substantial proportion of patients seen by physicians have had an abortion or will have one in the future, yet acquiring the necessary skills to care for 30 percent of the female patient population has been made challenging for future physicians by a number of laws and amendments.