Scholars@Duke
Benjamin Wade Frush

Benjamin Wade Frush

Medical Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine
Medicine, Hospital Medicine
benjamin.frush@duke.edu
3559 Blue Zone, Duke South Clinic, Durham, NC 27710
3559 Blue Zone, Duke South Clinic, Durham, NC 27710

Scholarly Works

Religious perspectives on postmortem tumor tissue donation: A report from gift from a child

Journal article Neuro-Oncology Pediatrics · February 12, 2026 AbstractBackgroundAccess to patient-donated tumor tissue is critical for cancer research, enabling direct study of tumor biolog ... Full text Cite

"Who am I to Say?" Why Clinical Ethics Consultants Should be Trained to Give Directive Counsel.

Journal article HEC Forum · February 1, 2026 Although clinical ethics consultation once involved the ethicist exercising practical reason to make moral judgments and recommendations, today clinical ethicists largely attempt to keep their “personal” moral judgments on the sidelines (Bell, 2022). Pract ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Radical Hope in Palliative Care.

Journal article J Pain Symptom Manage · February 2026 Jonathan Lear's book "Radical Hope" offers an important vision of what it might look like to come alongside patients who struggle to not only find hope, but even understand what the term might mean in the face of existential uncertainty. ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Making Fun of Medicine: Resisting Medicine's Principalities.

Journal article Perspect Biol Med · 2026 The figure of the "medical clown" is a theologically and anthropologically charged vocation necessary for moral critique and healing in contemporary medicine. Drawing on the Oglala Sioux Heyoka and the circus clown, or holy fool, the authors distinguish be ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

The Role of the Physician in Caring for Patients Pursuing VSED: Challenging the Conventional Approach.

Journal article J Am Geriatr Soc · December 2025 The conventional approach to caring for patients pursuing voluntarily stopping of eating and drinking (VSED) allows physicians to disagree with the patient's decisions to pursue VSED, but it assumes clinicians should accept the patient's choice and provide ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

"Scarcity," "Futility," and "Moral Distress": A Case Analysis of the Challenges of Sound Ethical Description.

Journal article J Pain Symptom Manage · November 2025 Appropriate use of ethical terminology is critical to effective, goal-concordant care, particularly for patients who are critically ill or nearing the end of life. In this case analysis, we describe how the ethical terms "scarcity," "futility," and "moral ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Trust the Process.

Journal article Acad Med · October 1, 2025 Full text Link to item Cite

Suffering Is Not Useless.

Journal article Am J Bioeth · August 2025 Full text Link to item Cite

Wellness versus flourishing in medical education: a critique toward a new synthesis.

Journal article Theor Med Bioeth · August 2025 In response to the increasingly acknowledged physical, emotional, and psychological challenges of medical education, 'wellness' initiatives have been widely instituted. While the idea of 'wellness' represents a well-intentioned effort to mitigate these str ... Full text Link to item Cite

First, Do No Harm (to the One You Train).

Journal article Linacre Q · May 2025 UNLABELLED: Primum non nocere or "first, do no harm" is perhaps the most well-known aphorism in the culture of medical education. While its application to patients is well known, the injunction can also be read with medical trainees in mind. Teaching physi ... Full text Link to item Cite

The Crumbs.

Journal article Linacre Q · February 2025 Contemporary medicine strains our ability as practitioners to attend adequately to the patients we serve in their moments of need. The account of Jesus' interaction with the Canaanite woman depicted in the gospel of Matthew offers a vision of patience, hum ... Full text Link to item Cite

Mess and Metaphysics.

Journal article J Pain Symptom Manage · December 2024 Full text Link to item Cite

Be a burden.

Journal article Palliat Support Care · November 12, 2024 Full text Link to item Cite

Enough.

Journal article Fam Syst Health · June 2024 The author presents a short story about doctors listening to patients and remaining committed to to their patients health. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved). ... Full text Link to item Cite

Loneliness in medicine and relational ethics: A phenomenology of the physician-patient relationship

Journal article Clinical Ethics · June 2024 Loneliness in medicine is a serious problem not just for patients, for whom illness is intrinsically isolating, but also for physicians in the contemporary condition of medicine. We explore this problem by investigating the ideal physician-patient ... Full text Cite

Learning to Forget.

Journal article J Palliat Med · May 2024 Full text Link to item Cite

Moral Diversity for Medical Trainees.

Journal article Perspect Biol Med · 2024 While the proliferation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives among medical schools and residency training programs has provided important benefits of demographic and experiential diversity among medical trainees, there has not been a simil ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

On Grace.

Journal article Acad Med · June 1, 2023 Full text Link to item Cite

Accountability as a virtue in medicine: from theory to practice.

Journal article Philos Ethics Humanit Med · March 22, 2023 Accountability is a norm basic to several aspects of medical practice. We explore here the benefits of a more explicit focus on the virtue of accountability, which as distinct from the state of being held accountable, entails both welcoming responsibility ... Full text Link to item Cite

Courage, Grace, and Community: On Virtue in Training.

Journal article J Pain Symptom Manage · February 2023 Full text Link to item Cite

Cross-Cover.

Journal article Palliat Support Care · December 2022 Full text Link to item Cite

Response.

Journal article Chest · September 2022 Full text Link to item Cite

The Virtue of Hope in Medical Training.

Journal article Linacre Q · August 2022 UNLABELLED: While many of the challenges of contemporary medical training are characterized uniformly as "burnout," such a diagnosis is nonspecific and overlooks the degree to which the flourishing of medical practitioners depends on the development and ex ... Full text Link to item Cite

The Admission Checklist: The key steps and responsibilities for the admitting resident.

Journal article Ann Med Surg (Lond) · March 2022 The process of admitting patients from the emergency department to the general medicine floor is foundational to the medical training process and medical practice more generally. Yet this process is rife with potential error if not approached systematicall ... Full text Link to item Cite

The Patient-Resident Physician Covenant.

Journal article South Med J · January 2022 Full text Link to item Cite

Letting Go.

Journal article J Pain Symptom Manage · October 2021 Full text Link to item Cite

On Aristotle and Upper Leveling.

Journal article South Med J · October 2021 Full text Link to item Cite

Cool Water.

Journal article N Engl J Med · September 30, 2021 Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Effacement.

Journal article Chest · August 2021 Full text Link to item Cite

The "I Don't Know" Moment.

Journal article Acad Med · January 1, 2021 Full text Link to item Cite

Remembering the Art of Dying: lessons for medical trainees.

Journal article Perspect Biol Med · 2021 In her book The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom (2020), Lydia Dugdale claims that a deep cultural forgetting process underlies contemporary society's impoverished views of, and practices surrounding, death and dying. Her thesis, and the cultur ... Full text Link to item Cite

Suffering Absence: Hauerwas and the Challenges to Faithful Presence in Contemporary Medical Training.

Journal article Linacre Q · November 2020 UNLABELLED: In this essay, the author draws on the theologian Stanley Hauerwas' work to describe the central challenge of the contemporary medical trainee as an inability to be present to suffering patients. While the central challenge to the physician was ... Full text Link to item Cite

Clerkship Ethics: Unique Ethical Challenges for Physicians-in-Training.

Journal article HEC Forum · June 2020 Three ethical conflicts in particular are paradigmatic of what we define as "clerkship ethics." First, a distinction that differentiates the clerkship student from the practicing physician involves the student's principal role as a learner. The clerkship s ... Full text Link to item Cite

Reflections of an Integrated Maternal-Child Health Medical Student Assignment.

Journal article Matern Child Health J · June 2020 INTRODUCTION: Clinical experiences expose learners to the patient perspective, which can have a lasting impact on students' professional identity. However, in busy clinical settings where opportunities for reflection may be limited, listening to patients' ... Full text Link to item Cite

Suffering and the moral orientation of presence: lessons from Nazi medicine for the contemporary medical trainee.

Journal article J Med Ethics · April 24, 2020 Medical trainees should learn from the actions of Nazi physicians to inform a more just contemporary practice by examining the subtle assumptions, or moral orientations, that led to such heinous actions. One important moral orientation that still informs c ... Full text Link to item Cite

Doing theology in medical decision-making.

Journal article J Med Ethics · November 2019 Full text Link to item Cite

High-Value Interviewing: A Call for Quality Improvement in the Match Process.

Journal article Acad Med · March 2019 Within the Match process, current residency interview practices are inefficient for both applicants and programs. Problems include disorganized interview offers and scheduling, excessive numbers of applicant interviews, unclear postinterview communication ... Full text Link to item Cite

Integrity in Action: Medical Education as a Training in Conscience.

Journal article Perspect Biol Med · 2019 While conscience in medicine has been a source of debate for decades, the role of conscience in medical training remains largely unexamined. Insofar as conscience is addressed, trainees are typically urged to avoid practices that will conflict with their i ... Full text Link to item Cite

What Should Physicians and Chaplains Do When a Patient Believes God Wants Him to Suffer?

Journal article AMA J Ethics · July 1, 2018 When physicians encounter a patient who gives religious reasons for wanting to suffer, physicians should maintain their commitment to the patient's health while making room for religiously informed understandings of suffering and respecting the patient's a ... Full text Link to item Cite

Physician Decision-Making in the Setting of Advanced Illness: An Examination of Patient Disposition and Physician Religiousness.

Journal article J Pain Symptom Manage · March 2018 CONTEXT: Little is known about patient and physician factors that affect decisions to pursue more or less aggressive treatment courses for patients with advanced illness. OBJECTIVES: This study sought to determine how patient age, patient disposition, and ... Full text Link to item Cite

To Those "Out There".

Journal article JAMA · September 26, 2017 Full text Link to item Cite

Risks of Medical Metaphors.

Journal article JAMA · August 1, 2017 Full text Link to item Cite

Ozone primes alveolar macrophage-derived innate immunity in healthy human subjects.

Journal article J Allergy Clin Immunol · October 2016 The present study demonstrates that acute ozone exposure of healthy human subjects enhances lung immune responses to subsequent bacterial stimuli. This highlights common air pollutant exposures as modifiers of the intensity of pulmonary immune activation. ... Full text Link to item Cite

Alveolar Macrophages From Healthy Human Subjects Exposed To Ozone Have Enhanced Response To Lipopolysaccharide (LPS)

Conference AMERICAN JOURNAL OF RESPIRATORY AND CRITICAL CARE MEDICINE · January 1, 2013 Link to item Cite

RETRACTED: NAD(P)H:quinone oxidoreductase 1 protects lungs from oxidant-induced emphysema in mice.

Journal article Free Radic Biol Med · February 1, 2012 This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (https://www.elsevier.com/about/our-business/policies/article-withdrawal). This article has been retracted at the request of the Authors. Since learning of potential discrepa ... Full text Link to item Cite

Extracellular Matrix Protein Mindin is Required for the Complete Allergic Response to Fungal-Associated Proteinase.

Journal article J Allergy Ther · September 20, 2011 Asthma remains an important cause of morbidity and mortality with an incidence that continues to rise. Despite the importance of this disease, the mechanisms by which the host develops allergic airways disease remain poorly understood. The development of a ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite