A list of medical dilemmas will never be exhaustive, because medicine evolves and patients or doctors meet novel challenges. The following should at least provide a starting point for Storytellers.
- Patient’s faith or ethics conflict with treatment
- Options to finetune faith or ethics, discover alternative treatment, or violate the patient’s wishes
- Healthcare provider’s faith or ethics conflict with treatment
- Boundaries of personal and professional lives
- Talking to patients on their level of understanding, which may be limited
- “Do no harm”
- Inadequate staffing or resources
- Physician burnout
- Bodily autonomy
- Including but not limited to abortion debates, women’s health, right to refuse treatment, etc.
- Age of informed consent/agency, parents refuse to vaccinate their children
- Limited information and life-or-death decision-making
- Empirical vs religious vs emotional beliefs
- Living wills and advanced directives, or lack thereof
- Inadequate training for healthcare professionals
- Speaking up when another professional causes harm, intentionally or not
- Privacy concerns
- What right does the community have regarding information? Even anonymizing information in a small town could be identifiable
- Could medical records leak and what happens if they do?
- Notifying biological family vs found family
- Preventing infectious diseases
- Options to consider within entire community or healthcare facilities, quarantine protocols, societal responses to fear, etc.
- Stigma vs education, e.g., with sensitive topics like STDs and STIs
- Addiction to painkillers
- End-of-life care and hospice/palliative decisions
- Romantic and other relationships between patients and healthcare providers