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How and when, during the course of a medical students education, should the subject of ethics be taught is a matter of much discussion. One program at the University of Iowas (UI) Carver College of Medicine adds an additional basic element teaching med students how to tell if an ethical problem is really an ethical problem.
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Ensuring age- and condition-appropriate medical care for young patients with special health care needs is challenging enough, but one aspect of their care that may not receive the attention it merits is the effect on a child when he or she is forced to transition from pediatric to adult care.
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There are some ethical issues that are universal end of life decisions, competency, and refusal of treatment, to name a few. But the questions involved and their answers seem to carry added weight when the patients are children.
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Recent challenges to the medical licenses of physicians who participate in state-ordered executions have been dismissed, but the physicians and ethicists who claim that participation violates the American Medical Association (AMA) code of ethics vow to keep up the complaints.
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Mistrust of the medical and science communities may be discouraging non-Caucasian cancer patients from enrolling in clinical trials, a research group has discovered.
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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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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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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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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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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.
