The lede:

Doctors agree on the basic tenets of medical professionalism, but they frequently fail to live up to those ideals in practice, according to a survey of more than 1,600 physicians in the Dec. 4 Annals of Internal Medicine.

Nearly all of the physicians surveyed agreed doctors should use medical resources appropriately, tell patients the truth, minimize disparities, see patients regardless of their ability to pay, maintain board certifications, evaluate peers’ care, avoid sex with patients, work on quality initiatives, disclose conflicts of interest, report impaired or incompetent physicians, and report medical errors.

But more than half of doctors told investigators that they failed to report a serious medical error they observed, or a colleague who was impaired or incompetent, to authorities in the last three years. And more than a third of the doctors said they would order an unnecessary magnetic resonance imaging scan to mollify an insistent patient.

The whole shebang.

The lede:

Medical students get a failing grade on their knowledge of physicians’ ethical obligations during wartime, according to a new study authored by a team of Harvard Medical School physicians.

The authors said their study, published in October in the International Journal of Health Services, should prompt medical schools to educate future doctors more thoroughly on the ethical questions they could face in an age of terror and torture.

But experts said that although medical curricula could cover military medical ethics, such instruction should be folded into discussions about the broader problem of dual loyalty — when doctors’ advocacy for the patient conflicts with other institutional or societal objectives.

The whole shebang.

The lede:

Two teams of scientists simultaneously announced they have reprogrammed human skin cells to obtain pluripotency, the characteristic hailed in embryonic stem cells as having the potential for therapeutic breakthroughs in areas ranging from Parkinson’s disease to diabetes.

Scientists in Japan and Wisconsin created the so-called induced pluripotent cells by introducing different combinations of genes into skin cells that are normally switched off after embryonic cells differentiate into various cell types. The results were published last month in Cell and Nature, respectively.

Researchers, ethicists, religious leaders and politicians hailed the findings, saying the innovative work could allow society to reap scientific and medical benefits of stem cell research without destroying embryos.

The whole shebang.