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More than one-third of American medical students are not required to study medical ethics, according to survey results compiled by the American Medical Student Association (AMSA), the largest independent medical student organization in the country.
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A recently published study of the effects of managed care on delivery of health care and screenings to enrollees found that it appears to improve care across the board. Particularly heartening are indications that the disparity in care given to white enrollees vs. black enrollees was narrowed sharply.
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When a frail elderly patient is treated for a serious, chronic illness such as cancer, death is naturally assumed to be a possible outcome. But death is not so easy to accept in young patients, as any health care professional who has had pediatric patients die knows.
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When a physician discovers that he or she has been party to a medical error that caused harm to a patient, the realization is followed by a succession of emotions that, if not managed appropriately, can cause the physician to react in a way that ruptures the physician/ patient relationship and possibly precipitate a malpractice lawsuit.
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Allegations that prisoners of war were tortured by American military interrogators at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, possibly with the complicity or knowledge of physicians working with interrogators, resurrected a question that has come up in every war for centuries: What role, if any, should health care practitioners play in the interrogation and torture of enemies of their government?
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) might have avoided one kind of controversy over the so-called morning-after contraceptive, but it created another by indefinitely delaying approval for the pill known as Plan B to be sold over the counter (OTC).
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When Ron Cranford became a doctor in the 1960s, hospitals didnt have ethics committees. There were no ethics consultants, not even any case law addressing such issues as physician-assisted suicide. Persistent vegetative state hadnt been coined, and Terri Schiavo was just a toddler.
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A catastrophic disaster, either natural or manmade, that not only results in widespread casualties but also wipes out medical resources can force health care providers to abandon typical delivery of care and shift to a kind of battlefield medicine, where the sickest patients may not be treated so that care can be delivered to more.
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The possibility of using embryonic stem cells to treat disease, a strategy known as regenerative medicine, is not yet being explored in clinical trials, but current ethical practices need to be strengthened now in preparation for this possibility, according to an advisory committee at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF).
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Public trust in clinical trial research was damaged in the past year because of conflict-of-interest issues that arose with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and by front-page media reports about drugs that had been studied and approved yet were found later to result in deaths among some people who used them.
