Transplant ethics under scrutiny – responsibilities of all medical professionals

Transplant ethics under scrutiny – responsibilities of all medical professionals

In this text, we present and elaborate ethical challenges in transplant medicine related to organ procurement and organ distribution, together with measures to solve such challenges. Based on internationally acknowledged ethical standards, we looked at cases of organ procurement and distribution practices that deviated from such ethical standards. One form of organ procurement is known as comme...

Medical credit cards come under scrutiny.

Credit cards that can be used only for health care expenses are growing in popularity in the United States, a trend that is putting money in the pockets of medical professionals but may be hurrying patients down the road to personal bankruptcy. Over the past three or four years, US financial institutions have begun partnering with health care providers to offer medical credit cards to people wi...

Under Scrutiny

How to Fairly Allocate Scarce Medical Resources: Ethical Argumentation under Scrutiny by Health Professionals and Lay People

BACKGROUND Societies are facing medical resource scarcities, inter alia due to increased life expectancy and limited health budgets and also due to temporal or continuous physical shortages of resources like donor organs. This makes it challenging to meet the medical needs of all. Ethicists provide normative guidance for how to fairly allocate scarce medical resources, but legitimate decisions ...

Folic acid under scrutiny

A consideration of the absorption and metabolism of folic acid in human subjects is timely, owing to the recent recommendation by the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition that a mandatory folic acid fortification programme be implemented in the UK. In this issue of the British Journal of Nutrition, Wright et al. take us through the processes of absorption and metabolism of...