Medical Ethics

A boards-focused review of the ethical-legal framework for patient decision-making: the primacy of autonomy, how to assess decision-making capacity (and how it differs from legal competence), the elements and exceptions of informed consent, the advance-directive/surrogate hierarchy, and exactly when confidentiality must be broken.

A board-focused walkthrough of end-of-life ethics built around the core rule that a patient with capacity always decides, with advance directives, surrogate standards, comfort-care principles, and next-best-step vignettes. Covers hospice vs palliative care and brain death vs PVS vs coma.

A board-focused ethics lesson on decision-making capacity (clinical, decision-specific, four Appelbaum criteria) versus legal competence, the default surrogate hierarchy, advance directives (living will vs. healthcare proxy), and the substituted-judgment/best-interest standards that drive next-best-step decisions.

A high-yield Step 2 CK ethics lesson on consent in minors: the default of parental permission plus child assent, and the exam-critical exceptions — emergencies, emancipated and mature minors, and confidential care for STIs, contraception, pregnancy, and substance use — with next-best-step logic for maintaining confidentiality and overriding parental refusal of life-saving care.

A Step 2 CK high-yield lesson on medical confidentiality and its legally and ethically mandated exceptions — reportable diseases, Tarasoff duty to warn, abuse reporting, HIV partner notification, and adolescent confidentiality — framed around next-best-step decisions.

A high-yield Step 2 CK ethics lesson on reproductive ethics, built around the two questions the boards actually test — who is the decision-maker and whether their competent choice is respected — covering minor consent frameworks, adolescent confidentiality and its abuse-reporting exception, maternal-fetal conflict, and physician duties. Includes three classic next-best-step vignettes, a consent-framework comparison table, and the emancipated-minor mnemonic.

How the USMLE tests research ethics: IRB approval before any human-subjects study begins, the Belmont Report's three principles, informed consent and equipoise, and the next-best-step calls on placebo use, vulnerable populations, and conflicts of interest.

Justice in medicine means allocating scarce resources by medical need and likelihood of benefit — never ability to pay or social worth — through transparent protocols, with disaster triage ("greatest good for the greatest number") and EMTALA as the highest-yield board scenarios.