What is most important for you to achieve?: an analysis of patient responses when receiving palliative care consultation.

Background: Hospitalized patients with a wide range of serious, but not necessarily terminal illnesses are now receiving palliative care consultations. The purpose of this report is to describe what palliative care patients say is "most important to achieve" at the time of initial consultation.

Methods: We conducted a retrospective descriptive content analysis of patient responses to the question "What is most important for you to achieve?" recorded at the time of initial inpatient palliative care consultation.

Ethical issues in palliative care.

Ethical concerns are common in palliative care settings. Rather than provide an exhaustive list of possible ethical problems one may come upon, this article describes areas of concern that are frequently encountered by perioperative health care providers, especially anesthesiologists, in the palliative care arena.

Is honesty always the best policy? Ethical aspects of truth telling.

Physicians have not always believed that patients should be told of their diagnosis. Modern, western medical practice places a high value on providing accurate, truthful information to patients. This is heavily influenced by the commitment to patient autonomy and participation in decision-making.

Effectiveness of Gorei-san (TJ-17) for treatment of SSRI-induced nausea and dyspepsia: preliminary observations.

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are apt to cause gastrointestinal adverse events such as nausea and dyspepsia. Gorei-san (TJ-17), which is composed of five herbs (Alismatis rhizoma, Atractylodis lanceae rhizoma, Polyporus, Hoelen, and Cinnamomi cortex), is a Japanese herbal medicine that has been used to treat nausea, dry mouth, edema, headache, and dizziness. The authors investigated the efficacy of TJ-17 for patients who experienced nausea or dyspepsia induced by SSRIs.

An annotated bibliography of psychiatric medical ethics.

We offer an annotated bibliography of psychiatric medical ethics that we hope will be useful for psychiatrists and other mental health professionals who are interested in the moral dimensions of psychiatric care. We present the educational and clinical rationale for the bibliography, ways to use the bibliography, and the bibliography itself. Using the American Psychiatric Association's Principles of Medical Ethics With Annotations Especially Applicable to Psychiatry as a principled framework, we selected references based primarily on educational and clinical relevance for physicians.