-
Virtually any predictive test that can be done on an adult can be done on a minor, from tests for Huntingtons disease to breast and ovarian cancer to schizophrenia, but the question is not whether we can, but whether we should, says John Lantos, MD, director of the Childrens Mercy Bioethics Center in Kansas City, MO.
-
A rapid response model for ethics consultations in the emergency department (ED) was developed at The Ottawa Hospital in Ontario, Canada, using terminology that ED clinicians familiar with rapid response teams can relate to.
-
It is important that the medical community understands that the cardiology and cardiac surgery communities are confronting end-of-life issues and the need to make appropriate treatment decisions based on an assessment of the likelihood that it will make a difference in a positive way, usually in a frail, sick, elderly patients life, argues Patrick OGara, MD, FACC, president-elect of the American College of Cardiology and executive medical director of the Carl J. and Ruth Shapiro Cardiovascular Center at Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston.
-
Many providers and health systems are unaware of the opportunity to leverage payment reform to develop or align community-based resources in order to provide better care and more support to patients post-discharge under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), according to James Corbett, JD, MDiv, a fellow at Harvard Medical Schools Division of Medical Ethics and Vice President of Community Health and Ethics at Steward Health Care System in Boston, MA. They may not connect that payment reform presents a tremendous opportunity, he says.
-
A growing number of states are promoting Physician Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment (POLST) Paradigm Programs, with the goal of helping physicians to better respect their patients wishes for end-of-life care.
-
Would you expect that offering state tax incentives or credits would increase organ donation?
-
The relief of suffering, including suffering from untreated pain, is fundamental to the idea of ethical practice in medicine, according to Nancy Berlinger, PhD, a research scholar at The Hastings Center in Garrison, NY.
-
Some bioethicists argue that it is not ethically justifiable to offer reused pacemakers overseas since these are not approved for use in the United States, but this goes on every day in the developing world, says James N. Kirkpatrick, MD, an assistant professor of medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
-
By refurbishing and repackaging pacemakers, we are de facto creating a new product, which no longer adheres to the original specifications, says Thomas Crawford, MD, an assistant professor of medicine in the Cardiovascular Division at the University of Michigan School of Medicine in Ann Arbor and co-chair of Project My Heart Your Heart, a program which collects used devices from patients and funeral directors to be someday donated to developing countries.
-
Because overtreatment imposes unnecessary harms upon a patient, it violates the normative rules of beneficence and nonmaleficence that pervade medical ethics, argues Erin Fuse Brown, JD, MPH, assistant professor of Law at Georgia State University College of law in Atlanta and former Visiting Fellow in Ethics and Health Policy with the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics at Arizona State Universitys Sandra Day OConnor College of Law.
