Doctor's Dilemma

Addressing overtreatment in breast cancer: The doctors' dilemma.

Concerns about the potential harm of treatments for cancer have grown because population-based screening has markedly increased the number of patients with relatively favorable prognosis. Approximately half the 280,000 patients diagnosed with breast cancer this year will have relatively favorable prognosis: one-quarter will be diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ and another quarter will be ...

Vaginal breech delivery at term: the doctors' dilemma.

"When an operation is once performed, nobody can ever prove that it was unnecessary". The Craze for Operations from The Doctor’s Dilemma: Preface on Doctors by George Bernard Shaw, 1909*. Breech presentation complicates 3-4% of deliveries at term and it is associated with an increased risk of perinatal mortality and morbidity 1,2 . The increased fetal risks may be due to the hypoxia or trauma...

Protest of doctors: a basic human right or an ethical dilemma

BACKGROUND Peaceful protests and strikes are a basic human right as stated in the United Nations' universal declaration on human rights. But for doctors, their proximity to life and death and the social contract between a doctor and a patient are stated as the reasons why doctors are valued more than the ordinary beings. In Pakistan, strikes by doctors were carried out to protest against lack o...

Do Financial Incentives Increase Doctors’ Willingness to Publish Research? – A Pilot Study of 21 Junior Doctors

Professionalism for future humanistic doctors

Dear editor Clinical environments encounter is an important part of studying medicine (1). Patient contact as an integral part of medical education occurs in various formats in the clinical settings (2, 3). During clinical training, medical students may experience high levels of stress, and some may not deal with it well. The abruptness of students’ transition to the clinical setting generated ...