Medical ethics: some reservations

Some reservations about clinical guidelines.

Clinical guidelines are the current fashion. There are perhaps four main grounds for this. First, the realisation that the results of clinical research are not taken up promptly and translated into everyday clinical practice. For example, meta-analysis of all the trials for thrombolysis for myocardial infarction showed that there was good evidence that thrombolysis reduced mortality by the mid-...

Paradoxical traps in therapeutics: some dilemmas in medical ethics.

The doctor-patient relationship is examined an emphasis on the comparison between professional and moral principles. Many therapeutic measures have opposite-directed alternative steps with an equal degree of justification, so that no logical preference is attainable and conflicts ensue. Thus patients come for relief and are ordered to endure further pain and discomfort; or weaker individuals ex...

Nursing ethics and medical ethics.

Treating anorexics without consent: some reservations.

Anorexia nervosa is classified as a mental disorder in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), and between 20 30 anorexics die each year in the UK.' There is no consensus about what causes the disorder or how it is to be treated. Feeding without consent usually becomes an issue when without further nutrition the anorexic will begin an irreversible decline to death. Once their wei...

Medical Ethics

IT is customary at the beginning of this address to refer to the changes which have taken place in the Staff of the Hospital during the year which has elapsed since the last Annual Oration. WVe have first to record with regret the death of a former member of our Dental Staff, Mr. WVilliam Muirhead Hunter, which took place on 26th MIay of tllis Nyear. Mr. Hunter was a native of Stranraer who qua...