Medical Ethics Advisor – October 1, 2006
October 1, 2006
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What are your ethical obligations when it comes to alternative medicine?
One of your patients is undergoing chemotherapy for cancer and is struggling with severe nausea. She tells you she wants to add acupuncture to her regimen of care; you have never been convinced that acupuncture provides benefits. What is your duty to the patient? -
Making hospital-acquired infection rates transparent
The push to make hospital infection rates more transparent is, on its face, an institutional and a patient safety issue. But there also is an ethics component, experts say, and health care has a duty to inform the public on hospital-acquired infections and to put that information in perspective so that it is not misleading. -
When patients ask you to hasten death, look closer
For various reasons pain, fear, or control patients sometimes consider ending their lives; occasionally, they even ask their doctors for help. But ethicists say, before responding to the question as asked, physicians first should look at what might be going on behind the question. -
Dealing with unpleasant patients? Be understanding
Given enough experience and patience, a physician can become adept at dealing with patients who they find noncompliant or overly demanding. But how does a clinician deal with a patient he or she finds utterly intolerable to be around someone who is abusive, insulting, or completely unlikable? -
Ethics stifling research? Some Britons say 'yes'
Some researchers in the UK have renewed debate over the limits placed on medical research by ethics regulations, saying ethical red tape is "stifling" advances in medicine. But ethicists in the United States say the argument is nothing new and that the review process for clinical trials protects both human subjects and research.