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Ethics: Medical Ethics
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Biomedical ethics focuses on a range of issues which arise in clinical settings. Health care workers are in an unusual position of continually dealing with life and death situations. It is not surprising, then, that medical ethics issues are more extreme and diverse than other areas of applied ethics. Prenatal issues arise about the morality of surrogate mothering, genetic manipulation of fetuses, the status of unused frozen embryos, and abortion. Other issues arise about patient rights and physician's responsibilities, such as the confidentiality of the patient's records and the physician's responsibility to tell the truth to dying patients. The AIDS crisis has raised the specific issues of the mandatory screening of all patients for AIDS, and whether physicians can refuse to treat AIDS patients.
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The study will be published in the October 2007 issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics. Battin conducted the research with public health physician Agnes van der Heide, of Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam; psychiatrist Linda Ganzini at Oregon Health & Science University, Portland; and physician Gerrit van der Wal and health scientist Bregje Onwuteaka-Philipsen, of the VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam. Van der Wal currently is inspector general of The Netherlands Health Care Inspectorate, which advises that nation’s health minister.
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One of the major areas where ethics and ethicists practice is in the field of medicine. Example issues are euthanasia, medical experiments, genetic modification of organisms and humans, vaccine trials, triage and others.
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Interest in ethics has resurged with the rapid social change and technological developments of modern society. For instance, physicians, who have taken the Hippocratic Oath to save life, cure disease, and alleviate suffering, are now faced with whether to use medical devices that can prolong life at the cost of increasing suffering, or to follow patients' requests to be allowed to die without extraordinary lifesaving precautions or to be provided with medications or devices that will end life.
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