Medical Ethics Advisor
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New Guidance on Controversial Organ Transplant Technique
Normothermic regional perfusion (NRP), which restores a donor’s circulation after death, is an ethically controversial new organ donation technique.
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Ethicists Answer These Two Questions on Elder Mistreatment
Should clinicians seek institutional intervention to prevent an abusive or neglectful surrogate from being involved in medical decision-making?
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Ethicists Can Assist with Elder Mistreatment Cases
Clinicians face many challenging ethical issues with patients experiencing elder mistreatment.
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Ethics Issues for Young Adults Vary Depending on Setting
As a medical student at the University of Michigan, Samantha Lyons, MD, HEC-C, regularly attended both pediatric and adult ethics committee meetings. Lyons noticed that for young adults, different approaches were used based on whether the patient presented to the pediatric or adult setting. In general, pediatric care was more family-oriented, whereas adult care placed more emphasis on patients being autonomous and independent.
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Many Hospital Websites Lack Information on Clinical Ethics Consultation Services
Many patients and family members, and even some clinicians, are unaware of the basics of what ethicists do or even how to contact them. However, many ethics services do not post any information at all on their institutional websites, a recent study found.
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Anesthesiologists Encounter Unique Ethical Issues
There currently is no standardized ethics curriculum for anesthesiology training programs in the United States. Thus, the ethics education trainees receive varies depending on the institution.
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Physicians Posting About Devices May Have Undisclosed Financial Conflicts
Most physicians who mention specific devices or companies in social media posts have undisclosed financial conflicts, a recent study found.
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Physicians May Have Ethical Obligation to Inform Patients if AI Tool Is Used
Did a physician factor in the recommendations of an artificial intelligence (AI) tool when ruling out a diagnosis or deciding whether to order a diagnostic test? If so, the clinician may wonder whether there is an ethical obligation to tell the patient.
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Ethical Approaches to Obtain High-Quality Crowdsourced Data
Researchers increasingly are using online recruitment (“crowdsourcing”) for studies. Rather than relying on undergraduate panels, such as college freshmen completing studies for credit, or basic convenience sampling using social media posts or flyers in classrooms, platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Prolific allow researchers to post their studies as “jobs” for online workers to complete.
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QI Initiative Increases Goals of Care Conversations
Many hospitalized patients lack goals of care conversations, causing ethical conflicts at the end of life.