Medical students' affirmation of ethics education.

Objective: Despite the acknowledged importance of ethics education in medical school, little empirical work has been done to assess the needs and preferences of medical students regarding ethics curricula.

Methods: Eighty-three medical students at the University of New Mexico participated in a self-administered written survey including 41 scaled questions regarding attitudes, needs, and preferences toward medical ethics and ethics education.

Results: Students reported strong personal interest in learning more about ethics in clinical medicine and research.

Nonpsychotic, nonparaphilic self-amputation and the internet.

The literature suggests that self-amputation is an outgrowth of either psychosis or paraphilia. In the case we present, the patient was neither psychotic at the time of amputation, nor did he ascribe a sexual motivation for his act. Instead, he had a long-standing idea that being an amputee was a critical aspect of his identity.

Maintenance ECT for recurrent medication-refractory mania.

Maintenance electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) can sometimes be the only treatment that yields extended periods of euthymia to patients with severe, treatment-resistant mania. We describe a case of a patient with recurrent and severe mania who responded acutely to ECT after failing various medication trials and could only maintain euthymia with maintenance ECT.