Skip to main content

All Access Subscription

Get unlimited access to our full publication and article library.

Get Access Now

Interested in Group Sales? Learn more

Medical Ethics Advisor

RSS  

Articles

  • Melanoma misdiagnosis brings ethical pitfalls

    There are multiple ethical and legal considerations involved with the misdiagnosis of a melanoma, according to a recently published commentary.
  • ACA ruling is ethical landmark: Health care is

    The most important ethical implication of the Supreme Court's ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act is "the recognized national responsibility to provide medical care for all citizens," according to Neil S. Wenger, MD, MPH, director of the University of California--Los Angeles (UCLA) Health System Ethics Center and professor at UCLA's Division of General Internal Medicine.
  • "Difficult trade-off" with research regs

    The goal of proposed reforms in regulations governing human research subjects is to enhance protections for research subjects while reducing burden, delay, and ambiguity for investigators, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Science Policy, which received more than 1,000 public comments on the proposed changes.
  • Placebos: What place do they have in medicine?

    There are several ethical questions surrounding the American Medical Association's policy prohibiting physicians from giving substances they believe are placebos to their patients unless the patient is informed of and agrees to use of the substance, according to a 2012 report from the Hastings Center.
  • Making ED organ transplant feasible puts providers in "difficult ethical territory"

    At the start of leading an 18-month pilot project to explore organ donation for patients who died in the emergency department (ED) at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Clifton W. Callaway, MD, believed the team was "creating, in reality, what the general public already thought existed."
  • EHR use growing fast, but ethical concerns are, too

    Access to the electronic health record (EHR) of an individual patient as well as what the person looking at the record does with that information remain concerns for all professionals and institutions involved in patient care.
  • Large-scale adverse events: Obligation to disclose?

    If a provider tells patients they might have been exposed to a blood-borne pathogen when they actually weren't, then the patients worried needlessly when there was no actual health risk.
  • "Drug-seeking" label is sometimes wrongly applied

    Is there clear and convincing evidence that an individual has no pain that would justify a prescription analgesic and is, therefore, seeking medication solely because of an addictive disorder, recreational use, or with the intent of diverting it to others?
  • Screening test might not be the ethical choice

    In general, patients think of a screening test as a good thing, says Arthur L. Caplan, PhD, director of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York, NY. "Patients aapproach this thinking that it is better to test than not test, and doctors have to be aware of that bias," he says.
  • More ethical care possible with long-term ICU patients?

    The history of cardiac arrest as an indication for resuscitation is "loaded with implications for current standards of care," says Daniel Brauner, MD, associate professor of medicine at the University of Chicago. At one point in time, resuscitation was used only in very limited instances, he explains.