'Clinical ethics' Category
Fueling the Fire: New Prenatal DNA Tests Spark Further Debate
A new gene test now claims to have the ability to detect a wider range of genetic disorders in fetuses. The test, called comparative genomic hybridization, uses “gene chips” to screen for 150 genetic abnormalities. Proponents of the test argue that this technology gives parents and doctors advance notice of the baby’s condition, [...]
A Duty to Die?
Alzheimer’s patients are a drain on Britain’s National Health Service, and should therefore consider ending their lives. So claims the always controversial Baroness Mary Warnock in a recently published statement.
Lady Warnock has been called “Britain’s leading moral philosopher,” and is especially well known for directing the Warnock Committee that set government policy concerning reproductive technologies [...]Is it Ethical to Pay for Organs?
Technological developments in medicine are making organ transplants fairly routine. When I first entered medical school in the 1970s, a kidney transplant was a major intervention. There were significant side effects to the drugs used to prevent rejection, and the mortality and morbidity rates were high.
Today, however, kidney transplants are routine, as are transplants of [...]Medical Tourism - It’s No Vacation (14)
Our July podcast is all about medical tourism. This is a growing trend in the United States, where some patients are going to other countries for their medical care. The idea is perhaps understandable in a medical system overburdened with waiting lists, third-party payer denials, and high costs. But there are serious risks along with [...]
New Threats to Rights of Conscience
In this age of radical patient autonomy and patient rights, the rights of doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals can sometimes be shortchanged. This may happen when individual choice trumps the right of a health care worker to refuse to perform a morally-controversial procedure.
The latest assault on conscience comes from the Ethics Committee of [...]The Nazi Medical Research Data: Use It or Lose It? (12)
In today’s podcast, we talk about one of the most egregious abuses of ethics in modern history: the horrible medical experiments carried out by Nazi physicians during WWII. Should we make use of the data that the Nazi doctors obtained, even though it was often gathered by taking the lives of Jewish prisoners in death [...]
Cash for Kidneys?
In a move that is likely to stir debate, medical and public policy groups are suggesting some fundamental changes in the way we regard organ transplantation.
Consider the case at a New York medical center where a woman and her brother were both operated on at the same time. One of the woman’s kidneys was removed, [...]Making Moral Decisions in Medicine
Our guest blogger this week is Matt Tabbut, a second-year med student (and Cedarville alumnus) at Chicago’s Rosalind Franklin University.
At this stage of my medical education, I have begun to look at some practical ethics case studies. There are a few beacons, or waypoints, that I use to help guide me in making decisions. Consider [...]Dr. Death is on the Loose
On June 1st, Jack Kevorkian was released from prison, after serving eight years of a longer sentence for second-dgree murder. A participant in at least 130 assisted suicides during the 1990s, he is still unrepentant.
Constrained by conditions of his parole, he can speak publicly about laws to allow doctors to assist in suicide, but he [...]Aborting the Less-Than-Perfect
During early fetal development, sometimes the esophagus fails to develop normally, a condition known as esophageal atresia. This happens once in about 3500 pregnancies, and doctors can frequently diagnose this condition by ultrasound prior to birth.
Except that sometimes the doctors are wrong.
In a teaching hospital in Florence, Italy, a woman had an abortion 22 weeks [...]
