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Because overtreatment imposes unnecessary harms upon a patient, it violates the normative rules of beneficence and nonmaleficence that pervade medical ethics, argues Erin Fuse Brown, JD, MPH, assistant professor of Law at Georgia State University College of law in Atlanta and former Visiting Fellow in Ethics and Health Policy with the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics at Arizona State Universitys Sandra Day OConnor College of Law.
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By refurbishing and repackaging pacemakers, we are de facto creating a new product, which no longer adheres to the original specifications, says Thomas Crawford, MD, an assistant professor of medicine in the Cardiovascular Division at the University of Michigan School of Medicine in Ann Arbor and co-chair of Project My Heart Your Heart, a program which collects used devices from patients and funeral directors to be someday donated to developing countries.
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Some bioethicists argue that it is not ethically justifiable to offer reused pacemakers overseas since these are not approved for use in the United States, but this goes on every day in the developing world, says James N. Kirkpatrick, MD, an assistant professor of medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
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The 2013 Hastings Center Guidelines for Decisions on Life-Sustaining Treatment and Care Near the End of Life acknowledge cost as an ethical concern in health care.
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Teaching medical students about mind-body approaches could help boost their compassion, according to a study from Boston (MA) University School of Medicine.
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Angelina Jolie's widely publicized bilateral mastectomy brought a great deal of public attention to the issue of what to do in response to genetic testing results, but also raised some important ethical concerns, according to bioethicists interviewed by Medical Ethics Advisor.
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The 2013 Guidelines for Decisions on Life-Sustaining Treatment and Care Near the End of Life were written with the nation's changing health care landscape and "the real world of clinical practice" in mind, says Nancy Berlinger, PhD, a research scholar at The Hastings Center in Garrison, NY. Berlinger is lead author of the new edition of the Guidelines and the director of the research project supporting the new edition.
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Recent trends demonstrate a widening use of drugs that can facilitate cognitive capability, both in patient and general-use populations, says James Giordano, PhD, chief of the Neuroethics Studies Program at Edmund D. Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, DC.
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Obesity presents many ethical challenges for transplant practice, according to a review article that describes an approach for applying available data on the importance of body composition to the kidney transplant population.
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Aborted hepatectomies and potentially life-threatening near-miss events during which a donor's life may be in danger but after which there are no long-term sequelae are rarely reported, according to a survey of 71 transplant programs that performed donor hepatectomy 11,553 times.
