Category / Case Studies / Patient/Physician Relationship
-
The Case of Immigrant Populations: Cultural Competence in Health Care
Delivering health care to non-English speaking immigrant populations requires knowledge and appreciation of the patient’s culture. Acquiring the skills to bridge the two worlds calls for self-awareness by the practitioner and a commitment to cultural competence by the organization.
-
![]()
The Case of Herman: Rejecting Doctors Orders
Herman, a fifty-five-year-old farmer, has come into the office of Dr. X complaining of an increase in the symptoms of a chronic problem.
-
The Case of a 20-Month-Old Boy
A 20-month-old Puerto Rican boy was admitted to the inpatient unit for failure to thrive associated with a decrease in appetite. The mother suspects it is empacho. Assumptions are important in ethical analysis. If you do not believe there is such an illness as empacho, how do you relate to the parents of this child?
-
Case Study – Tatiana Tarasoff: A Duty to Warn
When a therapist predicts that his patient is a danger to another person, does he have a duty to warn that person of the danger
-
Case Study: One Small Cut that Killed
The family wants answers, and so far, all they know is that he came in with one small cut and suddenly died.
-
The Case of Omer: Who Should Talk to the Family and What Should They Say?
How should an adverse event from a surgery be handled?
-
Case Study – I Know What You’re Thinking
An African American male patient, age forty-two, was admitted to a skilled nursing unit after surgery for head and neck cancer with lymph involvement, newly diagnosed. What is presupposed by his “life on the streets”? by his active drug use in the past?
-
Confidentiality in the Age of AIDS: A Case Study in Clinical Ethics
This article presents the case of an HIV-positive patient who presented the treating physician, a psychiatrist, with an ethical dilemma. We provide the details of the case, identify the ethical issues it raises, and examine the ethical principles involved.
In their article, “Confidentiality in the Age of AIDS,” Martin L. Smith and Kevin P. Martin present a complex case in clinical ethics. Their analysis examines a physician’s quandary when treating a mentally incompetent HIV-positive patient: whether to uphold physician-patient confidentiality or to violate this confidentiality by warning a third party.
-
Case Study – Walking The Tightrope
Is this 85-year-old patient “a complainer” or is she in pain?
-
Your Medical Mind
In their book, Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What is Right for You, Dr. Jerome Groopman and his wife, Dr. Pamela Hartzband say that each of us has a “medical mind,” a highly individual approach to weighing the risks and benefits of treatments.
