Being a patient and living a life -- Clinical space and traits of healing -- False starts and frequent failures -- Three journeys : A.'Ibuprofen and love', B. 'Staying tuned up', C. 'We all want the same things' -- Being a patient : the moral field -- Rethinking healthcare ethics : the patient's moral authority.

The Covid‐19 pandemic has concentrated bioethics attention on the “lifeboat ethics” of rationing and fair allocation of scarce medical resources, such as testing, intensive care unit beds, and ventilators. This focus drives ethics resources away from persistent and systemic problems—in particular, the structural injustices that give rise to health disparities affecting disadvantaged communities of color. Bioethics, long allied with academic medicine and highly attentive to individual decision‐making, has largely neglected its responsibility to address these difficult “upstream” issues. It is time (...) to broaden our teaching, research, and practice to match the breadth of the field in order to help address these significant societal inequities and unmet health needs. (shrink)

"This book maps the moral terrain in the grounded reality of human experience without relying on theories or systems of ethics as the primary orienting strategy. Moral awareness needs first to be appreciated for what it is before it is made to conform to theories or systems. And moral consciousness is not a steady or stable set of perceptions; as we change so do the moral challenges that most concern us"--.

In March 1996, the General Accounting Office (GAO) issued the reportScientific Research: Continued Vigilance Critical to Protecting Human Subjects.It stated that “an inherent conflict of interest exists when physician-researchers include their patients in research protocols. If the physicians do not clearly distinguish between research and treatment in their attempt to inform subjects, the possible benefits of a study can be overemphasized and the risks minimized.” The report also acknowledged that “the line between research and treatment is not always cleartoclinicians. Controversy (...) exists regarding whether certain medical procedures should be categorized as research.”This problem currently plagues gene transfer research. A few months prior to the GAO report, an ad hoc committee appointed by National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Harold Varmus expressed similar concerns in its assessment of NIH investment in research on gene therapy. (shrink)

In March 1996, the General Accounting Office issued the report Scientific Research: Continued Vigilance Critical to Protecting Human Subjects. It stated that “an inherent conflict of interest exists when physician-researchers include their patients in research protocols. If the physicians do not clearly distinguish between research and treatment in their attempt to inform subjects, the possible benefits of a study can be overemphasized and the risks minimized.” The report also acknowledged that “the line between research and treatment is not always clear (...) to clinicians. Controversy exists regarding whether certain medical procedures should be categorized as research.”This problem currently plagues gene transfer research. A few months prior to the GAO report, an ad hoc committee appointed by National Institutes of Health Director Harold Varmus expressed similar concerns in its assessment of NIH investment in research on gene therapy. (shrink)

Money plays a powerful role in modern medicine, both in terms of how health services are organized and delivered and increasingly in how physicians understand themselves and their work. The phrase “the hegemony of money” is intended to capture that power.

Many international business training programs present a viewpoint of cultural relativism that encourages business people to adapt to the host country's culture. This paper presents an argument that cultural relativism is not always appropriate for business ethics; rather, a code of conduct must be adapted which presents guidelines for core ethical business conduct across cultures. Both moral and economic evidence is provided to support the argument for a universal code of ethics. Also, four steps are presented that will help ensure (...) that company ethical standards are followed internationally. (shrink)

Our culture is well on its way to reducing medical ethics to legal requirements, general citizen ethics, or personal values. A distinctive ethic for medicine provides critical distance and moral meaning for the profession and an enriched societal ethic.

Lauris Kaldjian makes a strong case for respecting the role of conscience in the practice of medicine. His excellent book, Practicing Medicine and Ethics, presents an historically informed and carefully crafted explication of the role of conscience in Western ethics and its relevance for medical practitioners. The essay that initiates the discussion in this issue of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine is an equally well-written and lucid account of this important component of morality. But it is also worrisome in its (...) implications for insulating conscience from the other facets of moral thinking and feeling. The reasons Kaldjian's account is not finally compelling stem from his tethering conscience too... (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 11, November 2019, Page 63-64.

Weaknesses in Roger Sperry's "Defense of Mentalism" that appeared in the Spring issue of JMB are described. Sperry's clarification of his mentalist position still appears to lack a plausible mechanism of interaction. The wheel rolling down hill analogy is described as "a ghost in the subcircuitry." Neurological Positivism's energetic mechanism of brain-mind interaction is summarized. The relatioship of systems theory to reductionism is described briefly in terms of NP.

The ethicist's role in the clinical context is not presently well defined. Ethicists can be thought of as moralists, technicians, Sophists, or as teachers and learners. Each of these roles is examined in turn. An argument is made for the ethicist as a teacher who must also learn a great deal about the clinical setting in order to encourage an effective critical examination of basic values. Four specific tasks of this teaching role are discussed: describing moral experience, eliciting assumptions, considering (...) multiple alternatives and justifying choices. (shrink)

In March 1996, the General Accounting Office (GAO) issued the reportScientific Research: Continued Vigilance Critical to Protecting Human Subjects.It stated that “an inherent conflict of interest exists when physician-researchers include their patients in research protocols. If the physicians do not clearly distinguish between research and treatment in their attempt to inform subjects, the possible benefits of a study can be overemphasized and the risks minimized.” The report also acknowledged that “the line between research and treatment is not always cleartoclinicians. Controversy (...) exists regarding whether certain medical procedures should be categorized as research.”This problem currently plagues gene transfer research. A few months prior to the GAO report, an ad hoc committee appointed by National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Harold Varmus expressed similar concerns in its assessment of NIH investment in research on gene therapy. (shrink)

Kuttner and Rosenblum's presentation of the "only objective evidence for consciousness" is criticized for not adequately defining consciousness , not providing at the outset an explanation of the philosophical-theoretical interpretation of quantum theory that would lead to a direct rationale for their "impossible" quantum experiments, and suggesting that data from their impossible experiments could be treated as non-theoretical "facts." It is concluded that Kuttner and Rosenblum fail to objectify consciousness.

The multiple emergencies of global heating require bioethicists to embrace the dormant, comprehensive bioethics legacy of Van Rensselaer Potter, moving beyond the current narrower focus of the field on medicine and health care. We recommend readings that expand the core literature of bioethics to address key environmental issues. These are Jessica Pierce and Andrew Jameton's The Ethics of Environmentally Responsible Health Care; Dale Jamieson's Reason in a Dark Time; and David Wallace‐Well's The Uninhabitable Earth. Because efforts to mitigate climate disasters (...) are likely to be only partially successful, we also recommend the teachings of late Roman Stoicism and core texts of Buddhism, which provide ethical wisdom likely to be needed in the multiple crises of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Drew Leder's Clinical Interpretation: The Hermeneutics of Medicine [1] is an essay which understates its case and thereby opens itself to misinterpretation. This response to Leder argues for a more thorough-going hermeneutic for both medicine and science. At the conceptual as well as the practical level, modern medicine and its scientific foundations are hermeneutic enterprises. The purpose of this essay is to argue that we should not back away from this more radical thesis. Embracing it will result in less alienation (...) of physicians from patients, and of physicians from the tasks of medicine. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Duties to Others. Edited by Courtney S. Campbell and B. Andrew Lustig.

Book reviewed in this article: The Needs of Strangers. By Michael Ignatieff. The Health Economy. By Victor Fuchs. Just Health Care. By Norman Daniels.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 7, Page 15-16, July 2011.

AIDS and the responses and attitudes it evokes surpass the analytic abilities of standard bioethics. These responses and attitudes are explored in terms of literary and anthropological categories, such as dirt, disorder, pollution and ritual cleanliness. Implications for medical education are suggested.

Two decades ago, I wrote an essay expressing my skepticism about the nascent movement to certify bioethics consultants. My concerns were numerous. For example, I worried that the move toward certification would give too much weight to moral theory and neglect the importance of the less formal moral reasoning of patients and their families. I was also concerned that the effort to certify competence, complete with standardized testing, would be largely self-promotional and make unfounded claims about who has the capacity (...) to do this work. My worries were prescient. Notice, for example, the way that the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities was advertising its new Healthcare Ethics... (shrink)