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New findings by researchers at the National Institutes of Health show that minorities participate in health research studies at the same rate as non-Hispanic whites when they are made aware of the study and meet the medical requirements.
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The American Medical Association (AMA) has issued new ethical guidelines to help physicians balance public health goals with the interests of individual patients during epidemics.
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As the spectrum of end-of-life issues continues to expand, more and more questions arise for clinicians working with patients, families, and institutions.
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There is little evidence to support the argument that legalizing physician-assisted death would reduce patients trust in their doctors, according to researchers at Wake Forest (NC) University Baptist Medical Center.
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For various reasons pain, fear, or control patients sometimes consider ending their lives; occasionally, they even ask their doctors for help. But ethicists say, before responding to the question as asked, physicians first should look at what might be going on behind the question.
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Given enough experience and patience, a physician can become adept at dealing with patients who they find noncompliant or overly demanding. But how does a clinician deal with a patient he or she finds utterly intolerable to be around someone who is abusive, insulting, or completely unlikable?
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One of your patients is undergoing chemotherapy for cancer and is struggling with severe nausea. She tells you she wants to add acupuncture to her regimen of care; you have never been convinced that acupuncture provides benefits. What is your duty to the patient?
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The push to make hospital infection rates more transparent is, on its face, an institutional and a patient safety issue. But there also is an ethics component, experts say, and health care has a duty to inform the public on hospital-acquired infections and to put that information in perspective so that it is not misleading.
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Some researchers in the UK have renewed debate over the limits placed on medical research by ethics regulations, saying ethical red tape is "stifling" advances in medicine. But ethicists in the United States say the argument is nothing new and that the review process for clinical trials protects both human subjects and research.
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If, by arresting a doctor and two nurses in the deaths of patients at a New Orleans hospital after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti anticipated being hailed as a hero of the downtrodden and helpless, no doubt the backlash surprised him.
