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11Present Challenges in Decreasing the Time for IRB Research Reviews in the MilitaryAmerican Journal of Bioethics 16 (8): 53-54. 2016.
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11The Paradox of Paternalism and Three Steps Careproviders Can Take to Help All PatientsJournal of Clinical Ethics 13 (1): 3-17. 2002.
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10Allowing Patients to Find Meaning Where They CanJournal of Clinical Ethics 13 (3): 179-187. 2002.
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10Helping Patients by Involving Their FamiliesJournal of Clinical Ethics 22 (2): 99-106. 2011.Patients and their family members may become highly interdependent as patients near the end of life. To best help these patients, healthcare providers can try to become a member of the patient/family team. By becoming a member, careproviders can improve patients’ and family members’ access to medical information, more effectively offer advice, and assure patients and family members that they can still choose to do what they think is best.
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10Patients May Benefit from Postponing Assessment of Mental CapacityJournal of Clinical Ethics 17 (2): 99-109. 2006.
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10Beyond the State of the Art in Ethics ConsultationJournal of Clinical Ethics 20 (3): 203-211. 2009.
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9How careproviders can acquire and apply greater wisdomJournal of Clinical Ethics 23 (1): 3-12. 2012.In this issue of JCE, Baum-Baicker and Sisti present senior psychoanalysts’ views of wisdom.Although views on wisdom differ widely, there is agreement that when ethical conflicts arise, wisdom may be critical in bringing about an optimal result. Here I will present recent empirical findings on wisdom and the ways careproviders may acquire and apply it, especially in ethical conflicts. The findings are not well-known and may seem counterintuitive; I selected them, in large part, for those reasons…Read more
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9Do We Undervalue Feelings in Patients Who Are Cognitively Impaired?Journal of Clinical Ethics 17 (4): 291-301. 2006.
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8Beyond Shared Decision MakingJournal of Clinical Ethics 31 (4): 293-302. 2020.Shared decision making (SDM) is the state of the art for clinicians’ communication with patients and surrogate decision makers. SDM involves give and take, in which all parties interact to maximize the autonomy of patients. In this article I summarize the core steps of SDM and explore ways to use it to benefit patients to the greatest extent. I review three articles included in this issue of The Journal of Clinical Ethics that highlight additional approaches we can use to help patients and paren…Read more
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8Caring for Transgender AdolescentsJournal of Clinical Ethics 32 (4): 277-286. 2021.This introductory article presents some subtle and, perhaps, controversial aspects of providing care to adolescents who identify as transgender. I will describe (1) how praise from careproviders can benefit parents who have difficulty accepting the gender identity of their child that was not assigned at birth; (2) how adolescents who identify as transgender may follow the internet advice of peers on how to “con” careproviders; (3) how it may be difficult for careproviders to decide whether to fu…Read more
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8Patients with Invisible Pain: How Might We See This Pain and Help These Patients More?Journal of Clinical Ethics 34 (3): 219-224. 2023.In this piece I discuss two ways in which providers may become able to treat patients better. The first is for them to encourage all medical parties, including medical students, to always speak up. The second is to take initiatives to learn of pain that patients feel but neither show nor spontaneously report. They may refer to this pain as invisible pain, often bitterly, in that others not seeing their pain judge them wrongly and harshly. Providers, once seeing this pain, are encouraged to then …Read more
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8An explicit and reflective approach to the use of history to promote understanding of the nature of scienceScience & Education 18 (5): 561-580. 2009.
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7Edge-of-the-Field Ethics Consulting: What Are We Missing?Journal of Clinical Ethics 29 (2): 81-92. 2018.Ethics consultants’ grasp of ethical principles is ever improving. Yet, what still remains and will remain lacking is their ability to access factors that lie outside their conscious awareness and thus still effect suboptimal outcomes. This article will explore several ways in which these poor outcomes may occur. This discussion will include clinicians’ implicit biases, well-intentioned but nonetheless intrusive violations of patients’ privacy, and clinicians’ unwittingly connoting to patients a…Read more
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7"Third generation" ethics: what careproviders should do before they do ethicsJournal of Clinical Ethics 21 (1): 3-13. 2010.The author suggests that a “first generation” task in bioethics is to give patients the information they need; a “second generation” task is to do this in the most effective way; and a “third generation” task is to avoid harming patients by imposing value biases. The author discusses ways to pursue this third generation task.
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6Ethical considerations for psychedelic-assisted therapy in military clinical settingsJournal of Medical Ethics 50 (4): 258-262. 2024.Psychedelic treatments, particularly 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA)-assisted and psilocybin-assisted therapies, have recently seen renewed interest in their clinical potential to treat various mental health conditions. Clinical trials for both MDMA-assisted and psilocybin-assisted therapies have shown to be highly efficacious for post-traumatic stress disorder and major depression. Recent research trials for psychedelic-assisted therapies (PAT) have demonstrated that although they are …Read more
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6Beyond the Basics: More Ways that Ethics Consultants Can Help PatientsJournal of Clinical Ethics 33 (1): 3-12. 2022.The primary task of ethics consultants is to work with patients—and sometimes also their families—to discern and then meet patients’ and families’ needs and wants to the extent possible. That is primarily a cognitive endeavor. Yet the feelings of patients and ethics consultants may determine what they can work together to accomplish. This article considers their feelings. It looks at sources of distrust and their hopedfor resolution, specific means to enhance patients’ decision making in their r…Read more
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6When Careproviders Should Give Advice, Disclose Personal Information, and Reveal Their FeelingsJournal of Clinical Ethics 14 (1-2): 3-17. 2003.
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6Comment on the CEJA Guidelines: Treating Patients Who Deny RealityJournal of Clinical Ethics 17 (4): 317-322. 2006.
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5When Adolescents May DieJournal of Clinical Ethics 30 (2): 77-88. 2019.In this article I will discuss how clinicians might best treat adolescents who may die. I initially discuss these patients’ cognition, emotional tendencies, and sensitivity to interpersonal cues. I next discuss their parents’ feelings of loss and guilt and their clinicians’ risk of imposing their own moral views without knowing this. I then address the practical concerns of helping these patients gain or regain resilience and to identify strengths they have had in the past. I finally explore who…Read more
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5How to Retain the Trust of Patients and Families Even When We Will Not Provide the Treatment They WantJournal of Clinical Ethics 26 (2): 89-99. 2015.How might clinicians best try to retain the trust of patients and family members after clinicians oppose giving a treatment? If clinicians can maintain the trust of patients and families in these situations, this may soften what may be the greatest possible loss—the death of a loved one.I discuss what clinicians seeking to retain trust should not do—namely impose their values and reason wrongly—and introduce strategies that clinicians may use to reduce both. I present five principles that clinic…Read more
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5Beyond Determining Decision-Making CapacityJournal of Clinical Ethics 31 (1): 3-16. 2020.One of the most important and difficult tasks in medicine is to determine when patients have the capacity to make decisions for themselves. This determination may determine a patient’s life or death. This article presents criteria and approaches now used to make this assessment and discusses how these approaches are presently applied in five common disorders that can serve as paradigms for approaches in other disorders. I propose that since there are new diagnoses and treatments, reconsidering o…Read more
San Diego, California, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |