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This interaction involves a situation in which a physician allowed a compromise of professional boundaries in several ways. He acquiesced to a patient’s inappropriate requests for narcotics, and he entered into a romantic relationship with the patient. In the end, the physician paid a great price for his actions.

In this interaction, a patient rejected a particular recommendation from his physician. Although the patient continued to see the physician for other matters, he declined a referral to a urologist. Thus, this case explores ethical ideas associated with a patient’s refusal of treatment.

In this physician-patient interaction, the patient’s insistence that she be treated as an outpatient caused an ethical conflict with her physician, who thought she would receive better care by being admitted to the hospital. This case illustrates a common medical ethics question: How should a difference between a patient’s request and a physician’s beliefs about best care be resolved?

Clinicians and staff will find ways to work around aspects of an EHR system that are frustrating, time-consuming or inflexible. As the following case indicates, workarounds can generate errors, undermine patient safety and result in lawsuits.

Physicians should always consider how patients will react to seeing their own medical records. In the following case, sensitive information was prominently displayed in each office visit note in the printed out records. This issue became particularly upsetting to the patient when her records were released to her employer’s workers’ compensation carrier.