Medical Ethics Advisor
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Emerging Ethical Issues with Chronic Pain Care
The integration of telemedicine and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the specialty of pain medicine poses some unique ethical challenges, according to a recent paper.
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Strategies to Get Medical Students and Trainees in the Ethics ‘Pipeline’
Many medical schools offer electives or pathways that allow medical students to develop knowledge and skills in bioethics. “These are largely designed to create ethically competent clinicians, perhaps those that can provide ethical leadership within an institution. But I am actually not aware of many MD programs that are aiming to train future clinical ethicists,” says Janet Malek, PhD, an associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine’s Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy.
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Telesurgery Poses Unique Ethical Considerations
The cutting-edge field of telesurgery holds promise for improved patient outcomes, but there also are significant ethical considerations.
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Many Ethics Consults Involve Questions on Life-Sustaining Treatment
How are you going to justify the decision? This is the question Thomas D. Harter, PhD, asks intensive care unit (ICU) clinicians who are struggling with whether to continue or withdraw life-sustaining treatment.
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Clinicians Report Challenges with Goals of Care Discussions
As a clinician caring for patients with chronic critical illness, Sarah Andersen, MD, MS, observed that achieving meaningful goals of care decisions seemed to be more challenging than for other patients. “One of the challenges is that patients with chronic critical illness are often too sick to express their values and participate in decisions,” she says.
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Unique Ethical Concerns if Research Involves the Recently Deceased
Research on recently deceased humans is important to conduct, but there are many challenging ethical considerations.
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Demand for Pediatric Ethics Consults Is Increasing
As a long-term member of the ethics committee at Akron Children’s Hospital, Julie M. Aultman, PhD, noticed a shift in the types of consultations in which ethicists were engaged. Consults involved a wide range of issues, from end-of-life care to organizational ethics. Overall, cases were becoming more complex.
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Ethical Considerations with After-the-Fact Informed Consent
Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital are seeking to validate a new technology to isolate and identify bacteria in the bloodstream of very sick patients — something that takes more than 24 hours using traditional blood cultures.
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Most ED Patients Overestimate Success of CPR
Emergency physicians routinely need to ask patients about their wishes for care if they go into cardiac arrest.
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Moral Distress Common in Pediatric ECMO Cases
At Boston Children’s Hospital, 4.5% of pediatric extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) cases involved ethics consults, found authors of a recent study.