What, if anything, can medical ethics offer to assist in the care of the "difficult" patient? We begin with a discussion of virtue theory and its application to medical ethics. We conceptualize the "difficult" patient as an example of a "moral stress test" that especially challenges the physician's character, requiring the good physician to display the virtues of courage and compassion. We then consider two clinical vignettes to flesh out how these virtues might come into play in the care of "difficult" patients, and we conclude with a brief proposal for how medical educators might cultivate these essential character traits in physicians-in-training.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 30. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 10 February 2018.
All research outputs
#1,390,955
of 26,459,924 outputs
Outputs from The AMA Journal of Ethic
#411
of 2,816 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#26,048
of 328,021 outputs
Outputs of similar age from The AMA Journal of Ethic
#18
of 42 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 26,459,924 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 94th percentile: it's in the top 10% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 2,816 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 22.0. This one has done well, scoring higher than 85% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 328,021 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 92% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 42 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 57% of its contemporaries.
