My lede:

No U.S. medical board has disciplined a doctor for taking part in an execution, and that is unlikely to change, according to a new legal study.

The study, published in January in the Federation of State Medical Boards’ Journal of Medical Licensure and Discipline, is believed to be the first to comprehensively review all state laws and regulations on doctors, medical boards and executions. The study found that only seven death-penalty states incorporate the American Medical Association’s ethics code, which, among other things, bars physician participation in executions.

Nearly all capital punishment states specifically call for doctors to be involved in some way, the study said.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the investigator whose research sparked fears of a link between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, was rebuked on ethical grounds in a British medical regulator’s report released in late January.

The General Medical Council said Dr. Wakefield acted “with callous disregard for the distress and pain” that children would experience after being subjected to blood draws, lumbar punctures and other tests that were clinically unnecessary and not approved by his hospital’s ethics committee.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

It was about 7 p.m. when the ground began to shake — again.

Family physician Douglas McKeag, MD, saw panicked patients hobble on fresh casts and fractured bones, some dragging IV poles, as they rushed to flee the converted schoolhouse where he was working in a Dominican Republic city near the Haitian border.

Some patients on the second floor jumped from a balcony; one patient broke his back doing so. The building was still standing when the aftershock ended, but no one wanted to go back inside.

“We were out in the field taking care of patients, trying to restore order all night long by flashlight,” Dr. McKeag said. “We continued to get aftershocks or other quakes, ones that were even longer than that first one. We were delivering care between earthquakes, outside in the middle of nowhere. It was surreal.”

Dr. McKeag, from Indiana, was among scores of U.S. physicians who took leave from their everyday duties to respond to the aftermath of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti Jan. 12, killing an estimated 230,000 people and injuring another 300,000.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

When you hurt someone, saying “sorry” may seem like the least you can do. But when the hurt occurs in the medical arena, offering an apology is not so easy.

Thirty-five states have laws offering some kind of legal protection for physicians who express regret or empathy to patients who experience an adverse event. But laws vary in what they protect from admissibility in court. Most insurers discourage doctors from apologizing for fear it could hurt them in court, and lawyers often advise against it.

Hospitals are required to tell patients about serious mistakes. But it is unclear to what extent disclosure policies are followed, and these disclosures may not be accompanied by apologies.

More than a decade since studies first showed that openness and apology might work, “I’m sorry” is still rarely uttered in medicine.

The whole shebang.