Stemming the Shadow Pandemic: Integrating Sociolegal Services in Contact Tracing and Beyond.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on the challenges of complying with public health guidance to isolate or quarantine without access to adequate income, housing, food, and other resources. When people cannot safely isolate or quarantine during an outbreak of infectious disease, a critical public health strategy fails. This article proposes integrating sociolegal needs screening and services into contact tracing as a way to mitigate public health harms and pandemic-related health inequities.

Mock Trial as a Learning Tool in a Family Medicine Residency.

Background And Objectives: Mock trials have been used to teach medical learners about malpractice litigation, ethics, legal concepts, and evidence-based practice. Although 5.2% of family physicians are sued for malpractice annually, there is no formal requirement nor curriculum for educating our residents about malpractice, and mock trial has not been reported as an education modality in a family medicine residency.

Defining 'reasonable medical certainty' in court: What does it mean to medical experts in child abuse cases?

Physicians and others who provide expert testimony in court cases involving alleged child abuse may be instructed to state their conclusions within a 'reasonable medical certainty' (RMC). However, neither judges nor jurors knows what degree of probability constitutes RMC for a given expert, nor whether different experts use different standards to formulate their opinions. We sought to better understand how experts define RMC in the context of court cases.

The Affordable Care Act's preventive services mandate: breaking down the barriers to nationwide access to preventive services.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) transforms the U.S.'s public and private health care financing systems into vehicles for promoting public health by making evidence-based preventive services available nationwide through individual and group health plans, Medicare, and Medicaid.

The good, the bad, the ugly: the NAS report on strengthening forensic science in America.

In the long run, the NRC report can only have a salutary effect on forensic science. Although the report is not exhaustive in its review of the relevant literature and the law, and although broad constituencies may never embrace its most radical proposals, the report exposes the soft underbelly of a range of technologies, the organizational problems with the institutions that generate forensic science evidence, and the timidity of the courts in pushing for better science. Even if the full promise of the report is not realized, its publication ultimately should strengthen the good in a system of law and science that has its fair share of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Achieving clinical equality in an influenza pandemic: patent realities.

A twenty-first century novel influenza A (H1N1) pandemic is currently unfolding, and the eventual scope of this public health crisis is not clear. In addition, ongoing surveillance of the avian influenza A (H5N1) virus reveals outbreaks of human-to-human transmission of the virus, with significant mortality. Effective pandemic management depends on pharmaceutical intervention with two different clinical objectives: the generation of an immune response to specific viral strains (vaccination) and the reduction of viral replication in an infected individual (antiviral administration).

Institutionally sponsored mediation and the emerging medical trust movement in the U.S.

This essay identifies the bias that institutional sponsorship of medical mediation introduces and the probability that such bias undermines the ability of such mediation programs to generate trust by patients in physicians and health care institutions. Based on data from an emerging medical trust movement in the U.S.

Terminating life-sustaining treatment--recent US developments.

This paper reviews some recent litigation in the United States which addresses the difficult question of withdrawing food and hydration from both competent and incompetent patients. Whilst the decisions in question have manifested a trend towards favouring patient autonomy, they also indicate an underlying tension between doctors, health care facilities and their dying patients which is not yet close to resolution. The author suggests that the courts in the United States are likely to remain, for the foreseeable future, the final arbiters in that country of disputes relating to the termination of life-sustaining treatment.