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Doctors recognize the importance of delivering news of brain death as well as possible thoroughly, taking as much time as necessary, conveying the information of irreversible loss of brain function clearly and at a level family members can absorb.
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The United States is not ready to follow some European nations in presuming that deceased patients have consented to organ donation if they did not specifically opt out, according to the national Institute of Medicine (IOM). However, the need for donor organs calls for boosting efforts to increase donations, including using organs from patients whose deaths are determined by cardiac criteria.
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Surveys of ethics committees have long shown that the greatest share (90%) of ethics committee consults in the United States pertain to end-of-life issues. But in one growing specialty, ethics consults are about almost nothing but end of life.
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In a case described by a prosecutor as resembling a horror movie, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has received reports of adverse effects in patients who received human tissue grafts that were allegedly harvested from bodies in funeral homes without consent of families and, possibly, without being tested for infectious diseases as required by federal law.
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The Society for Adolescent Medicine (SAM) has issued a position statement rejecting current administration policy promoting abstinence-only education for young people, urging U.S. educators to present abstinence as one important option in an overall sexual health prevention strategy.
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If faced with the threat of SARS, avian flu or another epidemic, most Americans would consider quarantine a good idea but they wouldnt approve of strong enforcement. That is one American attitude toward quarantine described by Harvard public health researchers who studied U.S. attitudes about quarantine.
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The case of an 11-year-old Massachusetts girl, Haleigh Poutre, who suffered severe brain trauma last year as the result of abuse and is now in the custody of the state, has opened up discussion on withdrawing life support in pediatric patients who are diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state (PVS).
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Spirituality is recognized as a factor that many patients say contributes to their health; but now experts even some who previously had doubts are embracing patients and their own spirituality as an essential part of treatment.
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Though the Supreme Courts recent ruling in Gonzales v. Oregon says more about physicians authority to write prescriptions than about the right of states to pass laws permitting physician-assisted suicide (PAS), proponents of Oregons Death with Dignity law welcomed the ruling as a victory for physician discretion and patient autonomy.
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If a grateful patient presented you with one of his Aunt Marys special fruitcakes during the holidays, it was probably pretty obvious that such a gift presents no ethical dilemma.
