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As the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services begins a new initiative to reduce the transmission of HIV/AIDS, health care facilities once again are talking about a long-controversial issue whether health care workers should be required to undergo screening for infection with HIV, or hepatitis B and C viruses (HBV, HCV).
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Advance directives covering dementia care are complex, according to Rebecca Dresser, JD, Daniel Noyes Kirby Professor of Law and Professor of Ethics in Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, MO.
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Approximately 62 million Americans speak a language other than English at home, and 25 million have limited English proficiency (LEP).
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Almost all (96%) of 173 oncology nurses surveyed reported concerns about system barriers in their efforts to help patients prepare for the end of life, according to a 2014 study.
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Physicians often provide high-intensity care for patients at the end of life, even when the physicians would not choose this for themselves.
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Preclinical diagnosis of Alzheimers disease shares some of the same controversies surrounding preclinical states of other diseases such as cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and diabetes.
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Judaism is practiced in many diverse ways in the United States, yet sometimes even non-practicing Jews still observe Jewish laws at the end of life, suggests Barry Kinzbrunner, MD, chief medical officer for VITAS Innovative Hospice Care in Miami.
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As a way of addressing the potential for disparities in the delivery of health care services, U.S. physicians would do well to approach each patient individually, focusing on that particular patient's religious and cultural values, according to a paper published in November.
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The American medical community has been "fixated for so long on the preferences of patients" that not enough attention has been paid to the "fact that most of the decisions" at end of life are being made by surrogates not by the patients themselves, suggests Daniel P. Sulmasy, MD, PhD, professor of medicine and the Divinity School, as well as associate director, MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago.
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According to a new survey, physicians were significantly less comfortable discussing withdrawal of pacemaker (PM) and implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) therapy compared with other life-sustaining therapies, with about one-half stating that they were not comfortable having these conversations with patients, according to a new study published in HeartRhythm, a news release from the Heart Rhythm Society.