Medical Ethics Advisor
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Many Ethics Consults Involve Questions on Life-Sustaining Treatment
How are you going to justify the decision? This is the question Thomas D. Harter, PhD, asks intensive care unit (ICU) clinicians who are struggling with whether to continue or withdraw life-sustaining treatment.
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Clinicians Report Challenges with Goals of Care Discussions
As a clinician caring for patients with chronic critical illness, Sarah Andersen, MD, MS, observed that achieving meaningful goals of care decisions seemed to be more challenging than for other patients. “One of the challenges is that patients with chronic critical illness are often too sick to express their values and participate in decisions,” she says.
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Unique Ethical Concerns if Research Involves the Recently Deceased
Research on recently deceased humans is important to conduct, but there are many challenging ethical considerations.
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Demand for Pediatric Ethics Consults Is Increasing
As a long-term member of the ethics committee at Akron Children’s Hospital, Julie M. Aultman, PhD, noticed a shift in the types of consultations in which ethicists were engaged. Consults involved a wide range of issues, from end-of-life care to organizational ethics. Overall, cases were becoming more complex.
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Ethical Considerations with After-the-Fact Informed Consent
Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital are seeking to validate a new technology to isolate and identify bacteria in the bloodstream of very sick patients — something that takes more than 24 hours using traditional blood cultures.
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Most ED Patients Overestimate Success of CPR
Emergency physicians routinely need to ask patients about their wishes for care if they go into cardiac arrest.
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Moral Distress Common in Pediatric ECMO Cases
At Boston Children’s Hospital, 4.5% of pediatric extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) cases involved ethics consults, found authors of a recent study.
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Ethics Concerns over Undisclosed Conflicts in Psychiatric Guidelines
For six years, Brian J. Piper, PhD, has conducted studies on conflict of interest disclosures in the textbooks used to train physicians, pharmacists, and other allied healthcare providers.
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Many Ethical Questions Still Unresolved with Xenotransplantation
A group of experts recently convened to explore ethical and legal issues involved with xenotransplantation and attempted to delineate areas of consensus and areas where there is still controversy.
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Clinicians Need Help with Ethically Complex ICU Discharges
Clinicians are struggling with some intensive care unit (ICU) discharges that they believe potentially are unethical.