ArticleSociology of health & illness2020
Reinforcing medical authority: clinical ethics consultation and the resolution of conflicts in treatment decisions.
Article in Sociology of health & illness, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Applications of Medical Mediation: A Systematic Review of Its Role in Healthcare Dispute Resolution and Bioethical Decision-Making.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Surrogate Wars: The "Best Interest Values" Hierarchy & End-of-Life Conflicts with Surrogate Decision-Makers.HEC forum : an interdisciplinary journal on hospitals' ethical and legal issues · 2025Article
- Values Frameworks as Ideal Types: Navigating Ethics Conflicts with Normative Minorities : Values Frameworks as Ideal Types: Response to Critics of "Surrogate Wars".HEC forum : an interdisciplinary journal on hospitals' ethical and legal issues · 2025Article
- Whose Good Death? Valuation and Standardization as Mechanisms of Inequality in Hospitals.Journal of health and social behavior · 2024Article
- Clinical Ethics Consultation in Japan: What does it Mean to have a Functioning Ethics Consultation?Asian bioethics review · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Despite substantial efforts in the past 15 years to professionalise the field of clinical ethics consultation, sociologists have not re-examined past hypotheses about the role of such services in medical decision-making and their effect on physician authority. In relation to those hypotheses, we explore two questions: (i) What kinds of issues does ethics consultation resolve? and (ii) what is the nature of the resolution afforded by these consults? We examined ethics consultation records created between 2011 and mid-2015 at a large tertiary care US hospital and found that in most cases, the problems addressed are not novel ethical dilemmas as classically conceived, but are instead disagreements between clinicians and patients or their surrogates about treatment. The resolution offered by a typical ethics consultation involves strategies to improve communication rather than the parsing of ethical obligations. In cases where disagreements persist, the proposed solution is most often based on technical clinical judgements, reinforcing the role of physician authority in patient care and the ethical decisions made about that care.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.