Telemedicine and Healing Relationships

In the July-August 2023 issue of the Hastings Center Report, the lead article and two responding commentaries concern how telemedicine affects the relationships that physicians have with patients or their family members. Relationships are also at the heart of a case-study essay that brings together family ethics and clinical ethics to argue that the types of food provided to a patient and by whom the patient is fed should be a topic for shared decision-making. The second article in the issue focuses on why and how the assessment of an individual's decision-making capacity should take into consideration the risk-benefit profile of the given decision.