Medical Ethics Advisor
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New Palliative Care Policy Aims to Reduce Barriers
A new palliative care policy statement from a leading heart and stroke organization aims to reduce barriers that prevent many patients from receiving palliative care. -
Conflicts on Prognosis Occur Over Half the Time Between Physicians and Surrogate Decision-Makers
Conflicts between physicians and surrogate decision-makers involving the patient’s prognosis occur more than half the time, according to a recent study.
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Close Ties Between Surgeons and Device Reps Raises Ethical Concerns
“I often felt like I’m driving up the costs of the healthcare system …We used to sell an implant that has 99% survivorship at 15 years, which is great, right? We were told to not ever market it to anybody … If a doctor asked for it by name, we would give it to him. We want to market the newer, the better technology. I’m not certain I ever thought the newer technology was better. There certainly wasn’t data on it … I was uncomfortable with those sorts of things.”
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People with Mental Illness Often Excluded from Clinical Trials
If a medication for major depression has a dangerous adverse interaction with a different medication that’s being studied in a clinical trial, will it be discovered by researchers and reported in the literature? Not likely, if no one enrolled in the study has major depression.
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Physicians Have New Guidance on Ethics of Telemedicine
A patient asks her physician, whom she’s never seen previously, a particularly sensitive medical question. How does this interaction differ if the patient is at home, viewing the doctor’s response on a computer screen?
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Intense Competition, Inadequate Assessment are Factors in Research Misconduct
The number of retractions in scientific journals has increased significantly in recent years, according to research.1 Sometimes, it’s due to honest mistakes — researchers realize they made an error and want to correct the scientific record.
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Ethical Controversy Erupts Over Human-animal Embryo Research
Do animals with partly human brains, or producing human embryos, sound like science fiction? Some worry that creating “chimeras”— embryos with cells from more than one species — opens the door to just such possibilities.
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Undergrads See Real-Life Ethics by Shadowing Clinicians
Research suggests that medical schools can neither improve ethical inclinations, nor guarantee progress in moral reasoning for students who lack well-developed moral motivation and moral sensitivity when starting such training.
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When Should a Threatening Patient be Reported?
Recent amendments to federal patient privacy regulations give clinicians new allowance to report patients with mental health issues, but state laws may differ.
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Report: Proposed Common Rule Revisions Should be Withdrawn
The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to Revise the Common Rule should be withdrawn, according to a report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.