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Doctors and other medical professionals occasionally joke about their patients' problems. Some of these jokes are clearly wrong, but some joking between medical professionals is not only ethical, but it actually can be beneficial, concludes an article in the Hastings Center Report.
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According to a follow-up study in the American Journal of Public Health, few states in the United States have properly addressed ethical issues surrounding pandemic flu preparedness in recent years.
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The manner in which investigators, research institutions, and review boards handle incidental findings has evolved in recent years, with a consensus now forming around the belief that research sites have an ethical responsibility when it comes to reporting certain incidental findings to research subjects.
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According to a study that appears in Archives of Surgery, between 85% and 94% of patients were willing to sign forms permitting medical residents to assist surgeons, but many will not consent to giving residents a major role during surgery.1 Fewer patients consented when the form offered more detailed information about the education level or role of the student.
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For years, federal regulations have deemed the research use of deidentified blood and tissue samples collected in clinical procedures to be non-human subjects research, and therefore, they have not required informed consent from the patients from whom they were taken.
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What is an ethical physician to do when a patient provides pertinent information but insists that it be kept "off the record?" While there is an expectation of confidentiality between doctor and patient, there are instances when a patient will only reveal certain information if the doctor agrees not to record it in their medical files.
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Doctors need to become more aware of how governments subtly, but profoundly, interfere with their professional obligations and results in patients' human rights being violated, says a law scholar at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics in Baltimore, MD, in a commentary recently published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
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A new study from the Dartmouth Atlas Project seems to indicate the "report card" for Medicare patients at the end of life (EOL) is a mixed bag of pluses and minuses.
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Seeing a need for ethics guidance for local groups attempting to conduct community-based research, an organization in Kitchener, Ontario, has created an independent Community Research Ethics Office (CREO).
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Bioethicist Steven Miles, MD, professor, University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, has called for a renewal of military medical ethics in the United States.
