The American Medical Association's Code of Ethics prohibits physicians from prescribing treatments that they consider to be placebos unless the patients know this and agree to take them anyway.

Will genetic testing and personalized medicine change the way you think about your life?

Karen J. Maschke, a research scholar at The Hastings Center, is coauthor of a consensus article that explicitly outlines "significant new responsibilities" for biobanks concerning the return of incidental findings and individual research results to people whose biospecimens were used in genetic and genomic studies.

How can insurers justify spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient per year on "orphan drugs" – extremely expensive medications for rare conditions that are mostly chronic and life-threatening -- when this money could provide greater overall health benefit if spread out among many other patients?

Theresa A.