In her Health Affairs Blog post last fall, Sharon Brownlee lamented how frequently patients agree to treatments that they know little about. In the United States and elsewhere, clinicians have a clear ...

Informed consent is a necessary part of most medical procedures and yet people are largely unclear about its meaning and significance. It is the process whereby the detail of a medical treatment is ...

Additionally, the patient must be informed of feasible alternative therapies. The two legal claims are distinct, and a physician can be sued for malpractice, a type of negligence, for failing to ...

Delivering high-quality care starts with understanding what matters most to each patient. Clinicians can’t choose treatments that match patients’ priorities and values until they engage with them. The ...

I’m a senior physician with both clinical and clinical research experience. Before this year, I had undergone bilateral total hip replacements and a right total shoulder replacement. (As a younger man ...

It is usually a busy clinic run by qualified nurses and Community Health Extension Workers (CHEWS). On rare occasions, the attention of a doctor might be needed in the case of a difficult IUD ...

Among psychotherapists interested in mindfulness practices, there is a robust, at times contentious debate surrounding a number of ethical issues; a debate that dates back to the 1990s. On one side, ...

Efforts to improve informed-consent forms for clinical trials should not overlook difficulties faced by patients in non-Western settings (Nature 482, 16; 2012). Institutions in developed countries are ...

It is the policy of Western Michigan University that all research involving human subjects will be reviewed by the Institutional Review Board. The involvement of human subjects in research is not ...