Accepting a Valuable Gift From a Patient: It's Tempting, but Is It Right?

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hi. I'm Art Caplan. I'm at the Division of Medical Ethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

I'm going to talk to you about a case drawn out of my clinical case ethics experience. This was really a surprise, and it was very interesting. I think there may be diversity of opinion about this case. It's not about medical intervention, but a situation that was presented to me by a physician friend. He said it was hypothetical. I think it was real.

It was a famous artist who was undergoing treatment. We'll call him Pablo. He was undergoing deep brain stimulation, where you put a needle into the brain and stimulate an area of the brain for tremors. He had parkinsonism and it had kept him, as it got worse, from being able to paint for the past few years.

This newer intervention, the so-called deep brain stimulation, which is being made available in many hospitals around the world now, helped stop his tremors, and indeed, he began to return to painting and returning to his art. He was very grateful for this. He had been just despondent that he couldn't pursue his art.