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Welcome to Ethics Consult an opportunity to discuss, debate (respectfully), and learn together. We select an ethical dilemma from a true, but anonymized, patient care case, and then we provide an expert s commentary.
Yes: 40%
No: 60%
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U.S. law recognizes very few circumstances in which people owe duties to provide assistance to others without voluntary agreements to do so. Certain relationships do impose obligations, such as financial support for spouses and children.
Most states require individuals who begin to help a stranger during an emergency to continue rendering such assistance, to the best of their abilities, until help arrives as partial rescues run the risk of scaring off other would-be rescuers. Otherwise, only a handful of states compel innocent bystanders to offer emergency assistance.
Report to university administrators: 12%
Include in her research paper: 7%
Ignore it: 26%
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Medical ethics and research norms are constantly evolving. Some of the profession s most illustrious figures have engaged in conduct that in hindsight is difficult to defend. For example, Jonas Salk, the celebrated inventor of the polio vaccine, previously took part in conducting controversial research that sprayed wild influenza into the nasal passages of psychiatric patients.
J. Marion Sims, the father of modern gynecology, earned his initial fame by performing experimental surgeries on enslaved unanesthetized African Americans. Experiments that went largely unremarked on at the time such as the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment (1932–1972), in which poor Black men were denied a treatment for their disease so that government researchers could watch its natural course now appear deeply unethical.
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Welcome to Ethics Consult an opportunity to discuss, debate (respectfully), and learn together. We select an ethical dilemma from a true patient care case. You vote on your decision in the case and, next week, we ll reveal how you all made the call. Bioethicist Jacob M. Appel, MD, JD, will also weigh in with an ethical framework to help you learn and prepare.
The following case is adapted from
Emma, a medical student, dabbles in historical research during her spare time. She is writing a paper on the Oakfield hepatitis experiments, a series of studies conducted at her state s hospital for mentally impaired children during the 1960s.
Continue treatment: 70%
Other: 9%
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Questions surrounding when to halt aggressive care and to remove life support did not surface frequently in medicine until the 1970s, when new technologies from ventilators and dialysis machines, to more powerful antihypotensive agents and antibiotics made it possible to prolong the lives of the critically ill as never before. Right-to-die cases that entered the public discourse, such as those of Karen Ann Quinlan (1954-1985) and Nancy Cruzan (1957-1990), resulted as much from improved medical care as from any change in ethical norms.
Clarence s case raises two distinct issues that often arise in contemporary medical ethics: how to weigh sanctity of life against quality of life and what to do when an incapacitated patient s wishes are unclear and family members cannot agree.