A patient deciding to change doctors is not an unusual occurrence; sometimes, the physician doesn't even learn the reason for the change. It's a much more highly charged situation when a physician decides he or she must end a professional relationship with a patient.
A medical error creates guilt, fear, and loneliness for both the caregiver and the patient and patient's family feelings that can lead each side to withdraw unless efforts are taken by all parties to develop solutions and foster forgiveness.
A third-year medical student sits with an end-stage lung cancer patient who is in hospice. The patient wants to talk, but not about pain or death or advance directives he wants to know the student's plans for the future.
Since there have been pandemics and vaccines to fight them, ethicists have wrestled with the question of who should have priority when it comes to distributing vaccine. The federal government has released a draft in which it sets out how health authorities should allocate scarce doses of influenza vaccine in the event of a pandemic.
A survey of 5,000 U.S. medical students reveals that just over one-third understand the Geneva Conventions as they apply to military medical ethics; underlying that finding is the additional revelation that very few receive any medical school instruction in military medical ethics.
Two foundations that seek to establish a constitutional right to experimental therapy for the seriously ill will challenge a recent decision in a federal appeals court that favors the FDA's more cautious approach to access to experimental drugs.
The Seattle pediatric endocrinologist who spearheaded the growth attenuation treatment on a disabled 9-year-old girl known as "Ashley" died in an apparent suicide in late September.
HIV vaccine trials likely will continue for a decade or longer, raising questions about ethical considerations of enrolling participants across the globe.
