Reason clearly when the stakes are highest

If you are reading this, you have probably already been in the room where ethics matters — where a patient is declining a procedure you believe they need, where a family is demanding interventions the team considers futile, where an attending says something that doesn't sit right and you're not sure whether to speak up or stay quiet. You managed it. But you may have walked out wondering whether you reasoned through it as well as you could have.

That uncertainty is the right instinct. Clinical ethics is not simply a matter of good intentions or bedside manner. It is a discipline — one with a body of theory, a set of landmark cases, and a vocabulary of structured argument that makes the difference between a defensible position and a feeling you cannot quite explain. I built The Ethics Round because I believe every clinician deserves access to that discipline, taught with the same rigor we bring to pharmacology or pathophysiology.

The way I teach is deliberately Socratic. We start with a case, not a definition. We ask what you would do, and then we ask why, and then we press on the strongest objection. This is how real ethics reasoning works — not by memorizing the right answer, but by learning to hold competing frameworks in tension and articulate where you come down and why. The four principles are a starting point, not a checklist. Landmark cases — Quinlan, Cruzan, Schiavo, the Tuskegee study, and others — are not historical footnotes; they are the architecture of the reasoning you will use this week in clinic.

I also want to be honest about what this course does not promise. It will not give you an algorithm that spits out the correct ethical answer to every dilemma. Medicine is too complex and human beings are too particular for that. What it will give you is a set of frameworks robust enough to navigate genuine uncertainty — and the communication skills to bring patients, families, and colleagues along with your reasoning. That is the transformation I care about: not certainty, but confidence grounded in disciplined thought.

Whether you are a pre-med student encountering these ideas for the first time, a resident trying to hold your own in an ethics committee meeting, or a nurse who wants a stronger theoretical foundation for the positions you already instinctively take — you are welcome in this seminar. The questions are hard. That's exactly why they're worth sitting with carefully. I'll see you in the first case.