You leave the doctor's office feeling uneasy, wondering what guns have to do with your backache. American families may soon find themselves in this scenario. They profess concern for patient safety. But their ulterior motive is a political prejudice against guns and gun owners. And that places their interventions into the area of unethical physician conduct called boundary violations.
More recent literature recognizes a wide variety of nonsexual violations.
These cover such issues as finances, confidentiality, and gratification of the doctor's needs. Although boundary violations were first addressed in the psychiatry literature, it has become clear that they also occur in general medical practice. A patient who seeks medical or psychiatric treatment is often in a uniquely dependent, anxious, vulnerable, and exploitable state. In seeking help, patients assume positions of relative powerlessness in which they expose their weaknesses, compromise their dignity, and reveal intimacies of body or mind, or both. Thus compromised, the patient relies heavily on the physician to act only in the patient's interest and not the physician's.