Articles: professional-patient-relationship.
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Physician virtues, including humility, are crucial for shaping a physician's identity and practice. The health care literature offers varied views on humility, and the rising call for discussing virtues as a framing for professional identity formation underscores the need for a clearer understanding of physician humility. This review aimed to develop a cohesive conceptualization of physician humility and to define how it functions in medical practice. ⋯ The authors highlight some of the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and sociocontextual challenges to cultivating and practicing physician humility. These findings highlight the importance of promoting humility in shaping physicians' actions, thoughts, and relationships with patients, colleagues, and their profession. Integrating such virtues as humility into medical education is essential for upholding the ideals of the medical profession and cultivating moral agents who engage in self-reflection and embody the principles of exemplary physicians.
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JONAS Healthc Law Ethics Regul · Jul 2006
Caring theory as an ethical guide to administrative and clinical practices.
This article explores the conventional relationship between caring, economics, and administrative practices that no longer serve patients, practitioners, or systems. A shift toward human caring values and an ethic of authentic healing relationships is required as systems now have to value human resources and life purposes, inner meanings, and processes for workers and patients alike, not just economics alone. This shift requires a professional ethos with renewed attention to practice that is ethics/values-based and theory-guided, alongside evidence and economics. Emergent professional, caring-theory-guided practice options are presented, which are grounded on this deeper ethical moral and theoretical foundation for transforming the practitioners and the system.
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Clinical photography is an important tool for teaching practitioners and field workers about the clinical manifestations of famine and undernutrition, particularly with respect to the Global South. Current international guidelines for clinical photography are not consistently applied or enforced, which has led to violations of privacy and rights, particularly for patients and victims of disaster in the Global South. Combining existing clinical photography guidelines from the North with ongoing clinical ethics debates in the South, this paper explores approaches to establishing photography guidelines throughout the world that will be sensitive to the privacy and dignities of all patients and victims of emergencies.
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Generally, physicians have a legal and ethical obligation of keeping confidentiality regarding their communications with patients. So, the most complicated ethical and legal questions arise when the HIV-infected person deliberately avoids to report to the interested individuals about the possibility of HIV transmission. The decisive factor, which emphasizes the need of such a discussion about confidentiality in HIV cases, is the character of the HIV: HIV is incurable, causes the danger of fatal outcome, discrimination etc. ⋯ The paper analyses some specificities of confidentiality keeping in HIV pandemia, the responsibilities of a physician concerning the third party and his duty to warn him/her. Special attention is paid to those cases, when the fact of HIV infection has to be reported upon the patient's death or when the disclosure of the confidential information is connected with the possibility to start the post-exposure prophylactics. The paper presumes that confidentiality is not an absolute value, when there exists a real danger to the third party (e.g. a spouse, a care-taking relative, a victim).
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A critical examination of Richard Miller's position in his recent Children, Ethics, and Modern Medicine on how to handle pediatric interventions in cases of cross-cultural conflict between parents and doctors with respect to treating young children. Particular emphasis is placed on Miller's interpretation of and arguments about a Hmong case extensively researched by Anne Fadiman in her The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. The conclusion drawn is that Miller's position requires further nuance and development, and some recommendations are made toward that end.