AI Chatbots, Health Privacy, and Challenges to HIPAA Compliance.

This Viewpoint examines the privacy concerns raised by medical uses of large language models, such as chatbots.

Holding Clinicians in Public Office Accountable to Professional Standards.

Clinicians using governing authority to make public health policy are ethically obliged to draw upon scientific and clinical information that accords with professional standards. Just as the First Amendment does not protect clinicians who provide advice that fails to express standard care, so it does not protect clinician-officials who offer information to the public that a reasonable official would not provide.

AI-Generated Medical Advice-GPT and Beyond.

This Viewpoint describes medical applications of generative pretrained transformers (GPTs) and related artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and considers whether new forms of regulation are necessary to minimize safety and legal risks to patients and clinicians.

Assuming Access to Professional Advice.

Access to reliable health advice can make the difference between life and death. But good advice is hard to come by. Within the confines of the professional-client or doctor-patient relationship, the First Amendment operates in a way that protects good and sanctions bad advice. Outside of this relationship, however, the traditional protections of the First Amendment prohibit content- and viewpoint discrimination. Good and bad advice are treated as equal. A core assumption of First Amendment theory is the autonomy of speakers and listeners. Another assumption, as this Article demonstrates in the health context, is the availability of access to professional advice. This assumption, however, is erroneous because access to health advice in fact is unevenly distributed.This Article argues that assuming access to professional advice creates indefensible inequality. Lack of access to expert advice puts some listeners at much higher risk than others. Current First Amendment doctrine is largely unproblematic for those who can afford expert advice, and makes expert advice much costlier where health provider access is needed to obtain good advice. Those who lack access must place a higher degree of trust in widely-available information because they have no more reliable alternative. In other words, First Amendment doctrine places a higher burden on those who can least afford expert advice and who are most dependent on experts in public discourse.

Which Legal Approaches Help Limit Harms to Patients From Clinicians' Conscience-Based Refusals?

This article canvasses laws protecting clinicians' conscience and focuses on dilemmas that occur when a clinician refuses to perform a procedure consistent with the standard of care. In particular, the article focuses on patients' experience with a conscientiously objecting clinician at a secular institution, where patients are least likely to expect conscience-based care restrictions. After reviewing existing laws that protect clinicians' conscience, the article discusses limited legal remedies available to patients.

The Role of Civil Commitment in the Opioid Crisis.

This article seeks to shed light on civil commitment in the context of the opioid crisis, to sketch the existing legal landscape surrounding civil commitment, and to illustrate the relevant medical, ethical, and legal concerns that policymakers must take into account as they struggle to find appropriate responses to the crisis.

Physician Autonomy and the Opioid Crisis.

The scope and severity of the opioid epidemic in the United States has prompted significant legislative intrusion into the patient-physician relationship. These proscriptive regulatory regimes mirror earlier legislation in other politically-charged domains like abortion and gun regulation. We draw on lessons from those contexts to argue that states should consider integrating their responses to the epidemic with existing medical regulatory structures, making physicians partners rather than adversaries in addressing this public health crisis.

Professional Ethics, Personal Conscience, and Public Expectations.

Examining to what extent physicians are, or ought to be, defined by the profession when giving advice to patients, this commentary seeks to offer a better understanding of the potential conflicts that the American Medical Association's (AMA's) "Opinion 1.1.7, Physician Exercise of Conscience," addresses. This commentary conceptualizes the professions as knowledge communities, and situates the physician-patient relationship within this larger conceptual framework. So doing, it sheds light on how and when specialized knowledge is operationalized in professional advice-giving. Physicians communicate the knowledge community's insights to the patient. Thus, departures from professional knowledge as a matter of the professional's personal conscience are appropriately circumscribed by the knowledge community.