Editorial

Military Doctors and Deaths by Torture: When a Witness Becomes an Accessory
Steven H. Miles

Target Articles

Ban the Sunset? Nonpropositional Content and Regulation of Pharmaceutical Advertising
Paul Biegler & Patrick Vargas

The Right to Know Your Genetic Parents: From Open-Identity Gamete Donation to Routine Paternity Testing
An Ravelingien & Guido Pennings…

SICKLE CELL AND THE “DIFFICULT PATIENT” CONUNDRUM…

Here is a realistic scenario as written in the U.S. government’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality “Web M&M” website which could occur in any teaching or even in non-teaching hospital with hospitalists on duty.

An 83-year-old man with a history of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), and paroxysmal atrial fibrillation with sick sinus syndrome was admitted to the cardiology service of a teaching hospital for initiation of dofetilide (an antiarrhythmic medication) and placement of a permanent pacemaker.…

Every fall, I teach 30 medical and nursing students observation skills in our institution’s Art Rounds course. My colleagues and I take these students to one of our local museums where they learn how to observe their environment and patients by looking at works of art, learning about the role of observation in medicine, and by observing real life models.

Last month, an Art Round student told me that she spent part of her winter break touring the Smithsonian where she viewed a large portrait by the American painter Chuck Close of his father-in-law.…

In the 1970s, Benson Snyder at MIT published a book called “The Hidden Curriculum” where he claimed that students’ lack of educational progress and anxiety is caused by the unstated messages they observe at the university. These messages come from tacit social norms, unwritten obligations, and modeled behavior that contradicts what students are formally told. In 1994, Frederic William Hafferty wrote in Academic Medicine that he questions the value of teaching ethics in the formal instructional time in the pre-clinical medical curriculum.…

Hospitals in Adelaide, Australia had seen a young man looking like a doctor wandering hospital halls. Was this a case of Doogie Howser, M.D. – a fictional teenage doctor on a 90s television show – or something less benign? On February 1^st, a 17-year-old Australian was arrested for impersonating a physician. He was arrested after treating a 12-year-old girl for minor injuries related to a scooter accident. The charges against him include administering prescription drugs, assault, and identity theft.…

This blog post will appears as an Editorial in this May’s upcoming issue of AJOB

A Case (and Context)

The Medical Practitioner Tribunal Service in the United Kingdom recently revoked a physician’s license for failing to report treating a man who had been tortured and for failing to safeguard vulnerable detainees. The physician was serving with the UK military in Afghanistan. Baha Mousa, a prisoner, was brought to him with extensive signs of severe physical trauma.  Soldiers told him that the man had sustained trauma.…

Over the winter holidays I found myself in a coffee shop one night talking to Nelly, a nurse who works part time in her semi-retirement. She has been a nurse for 45 years, having graduated from a hospital-based nursing program in the mid-1960s and doing such jobs as labor and delivery nurse, performing insurance exams, working at planned parenthood and for the last two decades in infertility medicine. She explained to me how a national conglomerate recently bought the small medical practice she helped found.…