Medical Ethics Literature Research Articles

Ethical Dimensions in the Health Professions

Purtilo and Cassel have produced a masterful ethics handbook. Its strengths lie in concise, straight-forward language and its logically sequential format. The authors do not presume at any point previous training in or familiarity with ethics on the part of their readership. Though never patronizingly simplistic, the format of their text follows an outline that most philosophical tomes would do well to emulate. At the outset, the authors state their reasons for producing this volume and the agenda they chose to follow; the corpus of existent medical ethics literature, they believe, is directed toward the roles of physician and nurse. They intend to provide a handbook for student and practitioner in the allied health professions: therapists, pharmacists, technologists. Their immediate objectives are to increase an ethical awareness— that is, to raise the moral consciousness of those professionals by educating them to the stuff of ethics that characterizes their clinical practice—

Disability and the elderly.

In recent decades, evidence-based medicine has become one of the foundations of clinical practice, making it necessary that healthcare practitioners develop keen critical appraisal skills for scientific papers. Worksheets to guide clinicians through this critical appraisal are often used in journal clubs, a key part of continuing medical education. A similar need is arising for health professionals to develop skills in the critical appraisal of medical ethics papers. Medicine is increasingly ethically complex, and there is a growing medical ethics literature that modern practitioners need to be able to use in their practice. In addition, clinical ethics services are commonplace in healthcare institutions, and the lion’s share of the work done by these services is done by clinicians in addition to their usual roles. Education to support this work is important. In this paper, we present a worksheet designed to help busy healthcare practitioners critically appraise ethics papers relevant to clinical practice. In the first section, we explain what is different about ethics papers. We then describe how to work through the steps in our critical appraisal worksheet: identifying the point at issue; scrutinising definitions; dissecting the arguments presented; considering counterarguments; and finally deciding on relevance. Working through this reflective worksheet will help healthcare practitioners to use the ethics literature effectively in clinical practice. We also intend it to be a shared evaluative tool that can form the basis of professional discussion such as at ethics journal clubs. Practising these critical reasoning skills will also increase practitioners’ capacity to think through difficult ethical decisions in daily clinical practice.

The ethics of medicine: an annotated bibliography of recent literature.

Excerpt This bibliography is designed to introduce the internist and others in clinical medicine to the rapidly expanding literature in medical ethics. This field is important but controversial. So...

When Ethical Paths Converge

Commenting on burgeoning literature in medical and biological ethics, Albert Jonsen, bioethicist at University of California Medical Center (San Francisco), noted that the ethics of medicine is now in need not of more anthologies but of a comprehensive treatise revealing how ethical theory can be cogently applied to sorts of decisions encountered in medical practice. In their volume Principles of Biomedical Ethics, Tom Beauchamp and James Childress make a first, pioneering effort in what I hope will be a new generation of works in medical ethics. Over past decade, in addition to anthologies, a number of solid issue-oriented volumes have been published, some of which applied ethics to medicine in a systematic and sophisticated manner. What we have lacked is scholars with a

The literature of medical ethics: Bernard Häring

To the general reader and watcher of television programmes medical ethics may appear to be something new. This is not so, for hundreds of articles and many books have appeared over the last 10 years or so to discuss and analyse the problems arising from the practice of medicine. In this study of two larger works -Medical EthicsandManipulation- both by Bernard Häring, a Roman Catholic theologian - Father Brendan Soane analyses these in some detail and sets their ideas in the context of what has already been written on the major issues of medical ethics and what is likely to be foremost in discussion in the near future. Many readers of this Journal already have the particular background of knowledge to see the problems in medicine which are in fact ethical but the general reader may require help and enlightenment and this is now provided for a special field within the field.