Medical ethics Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description

Medical ethics is the discipline of evaluating the merits, risks, and social concerns of activities in the field of medicine.

Ethical thinkers have suggested many methods to help evaluate the ethics of a situation. These methods provide principles that doctors should consider while decision making.

Six of the principles commonly included are:

• Beneficence - a practitioner should act in the best interest of the patient. (Salus aegroti suprema lex.)
• Non-maleficence - never do harm (primum non nocere), from the Hippocratic Oath.
• Autonomy - the patient has the right to refuse or choose their treatment. (Voluntas aegroti suprema lex.)
• Justice - concerns the distribution of scarce health resources, and the decision of who gets what treatment.
• Dignity - the patient (and the person treating the patient) have the right to dignity.
• Truthfulness - the patient should not be lied to, and deserves to know the whole truth about their illness and treatment.

Principles such as these do not give answers as to how to handle a particular situation, but guide doctors on what principles ought to apply to actual circumstances. The principles sometimes contradict each other leading to ethical dilemmas. For example, the principles of autonomy and beneficence clash when patients refuse life-saving blood transfusion.

To reconcile conflicting principles, Bernard Gert, a philosopher who specializes in medical ethics, propounds a theory that would require us to advocate our action publicly if we were to violate any basic moral principles (e.g., break a promise in order to save a life). Others philosphers, such as R. M. Hare and Michael E. Berumen, would require us to formulate a universal prescription in conformance with logic, such that all rational parties, including the patient (assuming he is rational), would subscribe to the same action in all circumstances that share the same essential properties.

In the United Kingdom, General Medical Council provides clear modern guidance in the form of its 'duties of a doctor' and 'Good Medical Practice' statements.

Table of contents

1 Death and dying 2 Reproductive medicine 3 Medical research 4 Distribution and utilization of research and care 5 Critiques of conventional medicine 6 Critiques of alternative medicine

Death and dying

• euthanasia
• final directives and ethics of resuscitation and the withdrawal of life support

See also Do Not Resuscitate, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR)

Reproductive medicine

• accessibility of abortion
• cloning
• genetic manipulation
• eugenics

Medical research

• Patients' rights
• Nuremberg Code
• animal research
• stem cell research

Distribution and utilization of research and care

• accessibility of health care
• basis of priority for organ transplantation
• institutionalization of care access through HMOs and medical insurance companies

Critiques of conventional medicine

• medical error
• acceptability of toxicity in conventional medication
• invasiveness and danger of surgery
• toxicity of treatments such as chemotherapy
• iatrogenic illness

Critiques of alternative medicine

• regulation of pre-scientific medicine
• issues of compatibility between varieties of alternative medicine and the scientific method

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