The reasons for providers continuing futile life-sustaining treatment are primarily emotional, such as guilt, grief, fear of legal consequences, and concerns about the family's reaction, according to a recent study which surveyed intensive care unit (ICU) and palliative care clinicians.
Does a psychiatrist offer diagnostic neuroimaging to their patients and claim to diagnose and treat psychiatric disorders using the results?
When a friend or acquaintance asks for informal medical advice, Steven Brown, MD, a clinical associate professor at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, gives this standard reply: "I would be doing you a great disservice by pretending that I could give you good medical advice outside the context of a thorough review of your full medical history and an appropriate physical examination."
There are multiple ethical and legal considerations involved with the misdiagnosis of a melanoma, according to a recently published commentary.
The most important ethical implication of the Supreme Court's ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act is "the recognized national responsibility to provide medical care for all citizens," according to Neil S. Wenger, MD, MPH, director of the University of California--Los Angeles (UCLA) Health System Ethics Center and professor at UCLA's Division of General Internal Medicine.
The goal of proposed reforms in regulations governing human research subjects is to enhance protections for research subjects while reducing burden, delay, and ambiguity for investigators, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Science Policy, which received more than 1,000 public comments on the proposed changes.
There are several ethical questions surrounding the American Medical Association's policy prohibiting physicians from giving substances they believe are placebos to their patients unless the patient is informed of and agrees to use of the substance, according to a 2012 report from the Hastings Center.
Let's say you have a pretty robust system of patient safety and quality improvement (QI) and are up on all the latest trends in determining what needs attention and how to make effective changes.
How do you get residents interested and involved in patient safety and quality improvement? It is, after all, one of many requirements made of medical students by the American Council of General Medical Education.
Out of the 5,800 hospitals in the country, which is the best? Your answer probably depends on the criteria you use to measure the hospital and the peer group against which you measure it.
