Paul R. Helft, MD | Authors

October 15, 2015

One of the more difficult topics to discuss concerning the ethics of healthcare is distributive justice-the fair distribution of benefits, risks, and costs.

January 15, 2015

A delirious head and neck cancer patient does not have the capacity to make treatment decisions. Can we begin palliative radiation therapy without his consent?

October 15, 2014

Should I give a patient with a carcinoma of unknown primary another dose of a study drug, since she is requesting to continue it? My reading of the trial protocol suggests no absolute restriction on giving another dose of the drug.

September 15, 2014

I was recently consulted concerning a patient in the ICU at my hospital with advanced breast cancer, but I soon realized there were much larger issues at stake. This woman is in her 50s and was diagnosed approximately 1 year ago with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer.

October 24, 2013

In a case of a patient with impaired decision-making, is the physician obligated to go through with a transplant when the transplant-related mortality would be on the order of 50%, and possibly as high as 80%?

July 31, 2013

There are risks to privacy and informed consent embedded in the many exciting discoveries of personalized approaches to medicine. These risks vary greatly.

July 15, 2013

A 40-year-old woman with no significant family history of cancer came to me for a second opinion about her widely metastatic infiltrating gastric cancer.

May 15, 2013

I looked after one of my partner’s patients who is approaching death from advanced, refractory ovarian cancer. She asked me not to talk about anything negative with her. We can’t really make any decisions without discussing negative things. Should I just remain silent about them at her request?

March 02, 2013

One way of framing the ethical question in this case might be: “What are my ethical obligations to provide an anticancer therapy when I think it is unlikely to benefit the patient?” The broader clinical questions involved in this case are fundamentally the same in most patients.

February 15, 2013

In this article, we have chosen to focus on three ethical challenges that we believe practicing oncologists might commonly encounter with their patients. The ethical dilemmas are presented in a case-based approach in the hope of better joining the ethical theory to clinical practice.