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Biomedical subjects

N R Angoff

Publications and source records attributed to N R Angoff.

4 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1998

Teaching care of terminally ill patients: a primary care perspective.

Currently there is a great interest in educating medical students in the care of patients with terminal illness. When medical students do encounter patients with terminal illness, it is often in the acute care setting. We have designed a workshop for fourth-year medical students who are working in general medical, family, or pediatrics practices as part of their month-long primary-care clerkship. The emphasis of this workshop is on the care of the terminally ill patient as a natural extension of the continuum of care offered by a primary-care physician. The workshop involves an interactive interview of a patient with a terminal illness by a group of four to eight students and the guidance of an experienced physician facilitator. Four themes are identified as central to the primary care of patients with terminal illness, and emphasis is placed on communication skills and the meaning of language to the dying patient.

Clinical Clerkship↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Do physicians have an ethical obligation to care for patients with AIDS?

This paper responds to the question: Do physicians have an ethical obligation to care for patients with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS)? First, the social and political milieu in which this question arises is sampled. Here physicians as well as other members of the community are found declaring an unwillingness to be exposed to people with AIDS. Next, laws, regulations, ethical codes and principles, and the history of the practice of medicine are examined, and the literature as it pertains to these areas is reviewed. The obligation to care for patients with AIDS, however, cannot be located in an orientation to morality defined in rules and codes and an appeal to legalistic fairness. By turning to the orientation to morality that emerges naturally from connection and is defined in caring, the physicians' ethical obligation to care for patients with AIDS is found. Through an exploration of the writings of modern medical ethicists, it is clear that the purpose of the practice of medicine is healing, which can only be accomplished in relationship to the patient. It is in relationship to patients that the physician has the opportunity for self-realization. In fact, the physician is physician in relationship to patients and only to the extent that he or she acts virtuously by being morally responsible for and to those patients. Not to do so diminishes the physician's ethical ideal, a vision of the physician as good physician, which has consequences for the physician's capacity to care and for the practice of medicine.

Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome↗