“The Best Place for Bare-Knuckled Ethics”

Edmund G. Howe

The Journal of Clinical Ethics 24, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 3-10.

Abstract: In the documentary Boston Med, patients, their family members, and their careproviders agree to be filmed in real medical situations. Why would they do this? The possible answers to this question may help us to make sense of the paradoxical results of a recent study, in which patients with terminal illness ranked their careproviders highly for communication, even though the patients had failed to learn that they had a fatal illness. Based on this analysis, I offer careproviders a practical approach they can use to improve communication with patients, particularly to help patients to feel less alone. This same approach can also be applied in bioethics consultation.