Medical Ethics in Clinical Practice


Book Description

This book discusses medicine from an ethical perspective, whereas books on medical ethics more commonly present ethics from a bio-medical standpoint. The book is divided into 23 chapters. The introductory chapters present some basic concepts of medical ethics, such as the relation between the legal system and ethics, ethical documents, ethical theories, and ethical analysis. The following chapters address issues of importance in all fields of medicine: respecting autonomy, communication, relations within a healthcare team, professional malpractice, limited resources, and the portrait of a physician. In turn, the third part of the book focuses on ethical aspects in a broad range of medical activities – preventive medicine, human reproduction, genetics, pediatrics, intensive care, palliative medicine, clinical research, unproven methods in diagnostics and treatment, and the role of physicians who aren’t directly responsible for patient care. The last part presents students’ seminars with case stories. The book offers a valuable resource for physicians of all specialties, students of medicine, professionals, and students from other fields devoted to human health, journalists, and general readers with an interest in medicine.




Medical Ethics: A Very Short Introduction


Book Description

Issues in medical ethics are rarely out of the media and it is an area of ethics that has particular interest for the general public as well as the medical practitioner. This short and accessible introduction deals with moral questions such as euthanasia as well as asking how health care resources can be distributed fairly.




Clinical Medical Ethics


Book Description

This instant gold standard title is a major contribution to the field of clinical medical ethics and will be used widely for reference and teaching purposes for years to come. Throughout his career, Mark Siegler, MD, has written on topics ranging from the teaching of clinical medical ethics to end-of-life decision-making and the ethics of advances in technology. With more than 200 journal publications and 60 book chapters published in this area over the course of his illustrious career, Dr. Siegler has become the pre-eminent scholar and teacher in the field. Indeed his work has had a profound impact on a range of therapeutic areas, especially internal medicine, pediatrics, surgery, oncology, and medical education. Having grown steadily in importance the last 30 years, clinical ethics examines the practical, everyday ethical issues that arise in encounters among patients, doctors, nurses, allied health workers, and health care institutions. The goal of clinical ethics is to improve patient care and patient outcomes, and almost every large hospital now has an ethics committee or ethics consultation service to help resolve clinical ethical problems; and almost every medical organization now has an ethics committee and code of ethics. Most significantly, clinical ethics discussions have become a part of the routine clinical discourse that occurs in outpatient and inpatient clinical settings across the country. This seminal collection of 46 landmark works by Dr. Siegler on the topic is organized around five themes of foundational scholarship: restoring and transforming the ethical basis of modern clinical medicine, the doctor-patient relationship, education and professionalism, end-of-life care, and clinical innovation. With introductory perspectives by a group of renowned scholars in medicine, Clinical Medical Ethics: Landmark Works of Mark Siegler, MD explains the field authoritatively and comprehensively and will be of invaluable assistance to all clinicians and scholars concerned with clinical ethics.




Oxford Handbook of Medical Ethics and Law


Book Description

"Doctors have been concerned with ethics since the earliest days of medical practice. Traditionally, medical practitioners have been expected to be motivated by a desire to help their patients. Ethical codes and systems, such as the Hippocratic Oath, have emphasised this. During the latter half of the 20th century, advances in medical science, in conjunction with social and political changes, meant that the accepted conventions of the doctor/patient relationship were increasingly being questioned. After the Nuremberg Trials, in which the crimes of Nazi doctors, among others, were exposed, it became clear that doctors cannot be assumed to be good simply by virtue of their profession. Not only this, but doctors who transgress moral boundaries can harm people in the most appalling ways"--




The Trusted Doctor


Book Description

The Trusted Doctor rejects the reigning view that medical ethics is nothing more than the application of everyday ethics to dilemmas that arise in today's medical practice. Instead, it presents a new theory of medical ethics that is actually in line with the codes of ethics and professional oaths proclaimed by physicians around the world.




A Short History of Medical Ethics


Book Description

A physician says, "I have an ethical obligation never to cause the death of a patient," another responds, "My ethical obligation is to relieve pain even if the patient dies." The current argument over the role of physicians in assisting patients to die constantly refers to the ethical duties of the profession. References to the Hippocratic Oath are often heard. Many modern problems, from assisted suicide to accessible health care, raise questions about the traditional ethics of medicine and the medical profession. However, few know what the traditional ethics are and how they came into being. This book provides a brief tour of the complex story of medical ethics evolved over centuries in both Western and Eastern culture. It sets this story in the social and cultural contexts in which the work of healing was practiced and suggests that, behind the many different perceptions about the ethical duties of physicians, certain themes appear constantly, and may be relevant to modern debates. The book begins with the Hippocratic medicine of ancient Greece, moves through the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Enlightenment in Europe, and the long history of Indian 7nd Chinese medicine, ending as the problems raised modern medical science and technology challenge the settled ethics of the long tradition.




Methods in Medical Ethics


Book Description

Medical ethics draws upon methods from a wide array of disciplines, including anthropology, economics, epidemiology, health services research, history, law, medicine, nursing, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and theology. In this influential book, outstanding scholars in medical ethics bring these many methods together in one place to be systematically described, critiqued, and challenged. Newly revised and updated chapters in this second edition include philosophy, religion and theology, virtue and professionalism, casuistry and clinical ethics, law, history, qualitative research, ethnography, quantitative surveys, experimental methods, and economics and decision science. This second edition also includes new chapters on literature and sociology, as well as a second chapter on philosophy which expands the range of philosophical methods discussed to include gender ethics, communitarianism, and discourse ethics. In each of these chapters, contributors provide descriptions of the methods, critiques, and notes on resources and training. Methods in Medical Ethics is a valuable resource for scholars, teachers, editors, and students in any of the disciplines that have contributed to the field. As a textbook and reference for graduate students and scholars in medical ethics, it offers a rich understanding of the complexities involved in the rigorous investigation of moral questions in medical practice and research.




TOUGH CHOICES


Book Description




Rethinking Health Care Ethics


Book Description

​The goal of this open access book is to develop an approach to clinical health care ethics that is more accessible to, and usable by, health professionals than the now-dominant approaches that focus, for example, on the application of ethical principles. The book elaborates the view that health professionals have the emotional and intellectual resources to discuss and address ethical issues in clinical health care without needing to rely on the expertise of bioethicists. The early chapters review the history of bioethics and explain how academics from outside health care came to dominate the field of health care ethics, both in professional schools and in clinical health care. The middle chapters elaborate a series of concepts, drawn from philosophy and the social sciences, that set the stage for developing a framework that builds upon the individual moral experience of health professionals, that explains the discontinuities between the demands of bioethics and the experience and perceptions of health professionals, and that enables the articulation of a full theory of clinical ethics with clinicians themselves as the foundation. Against that background, the first of three chapters on professional education presents a general framework for teaching clinical ethics; the second discusses how to integrate ethics into formal health care curricula; and the third addresses the opportunities for teaching available in clinical settings. The final chapter, "Empowering Clinicians", brings together the various dimensions of the argument and anticipates potential questions about the framework developed in earlier chapters.




The Way of Medicine


Book Description

Today’s medicine is spiritually deflated and morally adrift; this book explains why and offers an ethical framework to renew and guide practitioners in fulfilling their profession to heal. What is medicine and what is it for? What does it mean to be a good doctor? Answers to these questions are essential both to the practice of medicine and to understanding the moral norms that shape that practice. The Way of Medicine articulates and defends an account of medicine and medical ethics meant to challenge the reigning provider of services model, in which clinicians eschew any claim to know what is good for a patient and instead offer an array of “health care services” for the sake of the patient’s subjective well-being. Against this trend, Farr Curlin and Christopher Tollefsen call for practitioners to recover what they call the Way of Medicine, which offers physicians both a path out of the provider of services model and also the moral resources necessary to resist the various political, institutional, and cultural forces that constantly push practitioners and patients into thinking of their relationship in terms of economic exchange. Curlin and Tollefsen offer an accessible account of the ancient ethical tradition from which contemporary medicine and bioethics has departed. Their investigation, drawing on the scholarship of Leon Kass, Alasdair MacIntyre, and John Finnis, leads them to explore the nature of medicine as a practice, health as the end of medicine, the doctor-patient relationship, the rule of double effect in medical practice, and a number of clinical ethical issues from the beginning of life to its end. In the final chapter, the authors take up debates about conscience in medicine, arguing that rather than pretending to not know what is good for patients, physicians should contend conscientiously for the patient’s health and, in so doing, contend conscientiously for good medicine. The Way of Medicine is an intellectually serious yet accessible exploration of medical practice written for medical students, health care professionals, and students and scholars of bioethics and medical ethics.