Ethical issues in patients referred for palliative radiation therapy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: As patients with advanced cancer approach end of life, ethical issues may arise. We describe ethical issues encountered by radiation oncologists in this setting. METHODS: A prospective, survey-based study assessed 162 consecutive consults for palliative radiation therapy (PRT) over 4 months at 3 hospitals. Consulting radiation clinicians completed a survey assessing palliative care issues encountered, based on national guidelines. Ethical issues included 5 subthemes (conflict between clinicians, caregiver-clinician conflict, internal conflict, feeling unable to do what was best for the patient, and violation of personal morals), an option for unclassified issues, and open-ended responses. Multivariate analyses (MVA) assessed potential patient-related predictors of ethical issues: gender, performance status (PS), PRT indication, physical symptoms, and presence of psychosocial, goals of care, care coordination, cultural, or spiritual issues. RESULTS: Of 162 surveys, 140 were completed (response rate =86%). Overall, 14 (10%) surveys identified ethical issues relevant to care; 11 of 14 (78%) identified more than 1 ethical issue. Half (7; 50%) involved conflict between clinicians and clinician-caregiver conflict; 6 (43%) involved clinician distress or internal conflict; and 2 (14%) felt impeded from doing what they felt was best for the patient. Open-ended responses revealed differences in opinion between medical specialties (n=6, 43%), and conflict related to coordination of care among clinicians (n=3, 21%). On UVA, ethical issues were associated with PRT referrals for bleeding, dyspnea, or dysphagia due to visceral metastases (30%) versus CNS indications such as brain metastases or cord compression (7%) or for bony metastases (4%) P<0.001. On MVA, ethical issues were associated with PRT for visceral metastases (OR 13.0; 95% CI, 2.3-74.6; P<0.001) and presence of spiritual issues (OR 4.0; 95% CI, 1.1-14.5; P=0.04). CONCLUSIONS: At least 1 in 10 referrals for PRT involve ethical issues. Further studies are warranted to assess the ability of radiation oncologists to manage ethical issues.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".