AMA Journal of Ethics

Health By Law: Embryonic Personhood in Alabama

This activity is comprised of five multiple-choice questions based on the content of an AMA Journal of Ethics podcast about the Alabama Supreme Court decision in LePage v Center for Reproductive Medicine and the legal, clinical, and ethical implications of…

Ethics Talk: Whose Job Is Antimicrobial Stewardship?

This activity is comprised of five multiple-choice questions based on the content of an AMA Journal of Ethics podcast about the key roles of infectious disease pharmacists in antimicrobial stewardship. The featured guests are Drs Lynne Fehrenbacher, a professor in…

Why Assuring the Quality of Antimicrobials Is a Global Imperative

Poor-quality antimicrobial medicines continue to proliferate across supply chains, threatening patients’ health and safety, especially in low- and middle-income regions. This article discusses consequences and risks of antimicrobial resistance and other ways in which antimicrobial medicines can be of poor…

How to Mitigate Community Harms of Antibacterial Resistance With Patient-Centered Care

Overprescription of antibiotics in cases in which bacterial infection is clinically uncertain contributes to increased prevalence of multidrug-resistant bacteria. Ethically, merits and drawbacks of stricter prescription practice oversight should be weighed against risks of untreatable bacterial infections to patients and…

How Should We Think About Clinicians’ Individual Antibiotic Stewardship Duties?

The language of antibiotic stewardship is often used to capture the moral importance of individual prescribers doing their part to combat antibiotic resistance. “Stewardship” as an ethics concept borrows from collective action problems—those that cannot be solved by individuals only—like…

How Should Focus Be Shifted From Individual Preference to Collective Wisdom for Patients at the End of Life With Antimicrobial-Resistant Infections?

Despite growth in numbers of organizational antimicrobial stewardship programs, antimicrobial resistance continues to escalate. Interprofessional education and collaboration are needed to make these programs appropriately responsive to the ethically and clinically complex needs of patients at the end of life…

A Brief History of Antimicrobial Resistance

Despite mounting attention in recent years, health threats posed by antimicrobial resistance are not new. Antimicrobial resistance has dogged infectious disease treatment processes since the first modern antimicrobials were discovered.