Ethics

"Ethical Issues in Pediatric Surgery" Eric Grossman, MD Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago 25th Anniversary MacLean Conference on Clinical Medical Ethics P...  

It is increasingly recognized that the best treatment for most coughing children is time. But is it ever acceptable to offer more?  

Increasingly mandated but questioned on ethical grounds, opioid agreements appear to be here to stay; experts weigh in on the pros and cons.  

Dr Lemoine discusses the placebo effect in history and modern medicine.  

Honorary authorship can become a complicated ethical issue for researchers. Are postgraduate medical trainees fully aware of the practices and guidelines?  

Identification of women whose pregnancies are at higher than average risk of preterm birth would allow the possibility of providing the women with higher level antenatal care with the aim of preventing the preterm birth. Preterm birth (before 37 completed weeks' gestation) is a major public health problem worldwide, and occurs in 6% to 10% of births in high-income countries. The proportion of pregnancies which end prematurely, between 20 and 36 weeks, has not fallen in recent years. Perinatal interventions, both before birth (transfer of women to tertiary care, antenatal steroids), and after birth (intensive care, surfactant) have markedly improved perinatal outcomes. A number of scoring systems of risk factors associated with preterm birth have been used. Systematic, objective measures can include age, marital status, socio-economic factors, smoking, threatened miscarriage, previous low birthweight baby, previous stillbirth, maternal weight and height. Their ability to identify women at increased risk of preterm birth, and subsequently to prevent preterm birth, has not been evaluated by randomised controlled trials. The literature search for this review revealed no trials of the use of risk-scoring systems to prevent preterm birth. There are a number of ethical issues involved in the decision to implement risk scoring that have not been evaluated; for example, an intervention with potential morbidity and may be used, or used more frequently with no evidence of more favourable outcomes, or the woman may prefer not to disclose some sensitive information included in the measures. There is a need for prospective studies that evaluate the use of risk-scoring systems to prevent preterm birth, including an assessment of their impact on women's well-being. If these prove promising, they should be followed by an adequately powered, well-designed randomised controlled trial.  

The Punjab Medical Council has sent notices to 10 doctors for receiving funds from pharmaceutical and allied healthcare companies, alleging that the doctors violated the code of ethics of the Medical Council of India.  

The Punjab Medical Council has sent notices to 10 doctors for receiving funds from pharmaceutical and allied healthcare companies, alleging that the doctors violated the code of ethics of the Medical Council of India.  

If novice nurses see experienced nurses behave unethically do they adopt those behaviors as the norm?  

Physicians who choose this model should consider ways to mitigate the potential access barriers that come with up-front fees and cash-only operations, the ACP said in a new policy paper.  

A cancer genomics researcher, whose reported findings appeared in some of the world’s most prestigious journals and prompted the initiation of several clinical trials, has been found guilty of research misconduct by the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Research Integrity (ORI).  

A study of the practice, banned in 2011, is reviving questions about ethics and patient safety.  

Source: Bioethics? That what it is?...By Félix Martín  

Let me suggest a topic for discussion that might be a bit provocative. It's about the prices that sometimes we have to pay for advances in medicine. Ist phase clinical trial of a new painkiller drug manufactured by Bial (Portugal) failed with one man brain-dead and another five ones in critical state with neurologic symptoms, three of them are suspected to have irreversable changes in their CNS. [Links to news articles below] What is your opinion: who carries responsibility for these cases? Bial, Biotrial clinic that carried out the trial or maybe somone else involved? What kind of responsibility must it be provided the fact people involved in the study are volunteers and must have been consulted about specificity and all the issues that can arise in phase I clinical trials? Could there take place unproperly done preclinical trial? What do you think about it? ||You can follow these links to get more information about the case: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35337671 http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/857379  

Introduction: An ACP Ethics case history and commentary discuss ethical questions regarding patient privacy and confidentiality, as well as the moral and ethical development of physicians-in-training in the handling of patient information.  

With blood donations dropping, the FDA's recent lifting of the ban on gay men giving blood after 12 months of celibacy was necessary, argues Dr Art Caplan, although the new policy still has flaws.  

: Interprofessional collaboration is only as successful as the principles and values that underlie the commitment to collaboration and the fundamental values of the system attempting to apply it.  

There's no getting away from the fact that finals are tricky. Becoming a confident House Officer involves not only medicine, surgery and psychiatry, but also communication, ethics, and practical skills. Get Through Clinical Finals: A Toolkit for OSCEs is intended to help identify these areas, to show the reader how to avoid the common pitfalls and, by combining such information, how to successfully mind that gap.Forming part of the best selling and well respected 'Get Through' series, this book aims to provide medical students with practical advice on how to revise and pass their OSCEs (Observed Structured Clinical Examinations). Featuring numerous practice scenarios in all the major specialties, Get Through Clinical Finals contains the information that finalists are expected to know but are rarely taught. Written by recently qualified doctors, this is the ideal toolkit in the run up to clinical finals.  

There are many major ethical issues surrounding the control and elimination of malaria. How do we combat these issues and the disease itself?  

This commentary focuses on the ethical issues concerning childhood immunization in the United States. How can we balance respecting parental rights and autonomy while maximizing the greater good?