Ethical Issues in Clinical Practice in Endocrinology

Professional integrity requires medical practitioners to practice according to the best medical and ethical standards in different field of medical care, research, and education. Professional authority would not justify doctors to overstep the ethical boundaries even if the medical decision is scientifically sound. Physicians should be informed about ethical principles and guidelines and put them into their practice all the time. Codes of ethics in various field of medicine protect professional integrity by providing guiding rules. As a response to the necessity of ethical excellence in medical practice, physicians' charter and codes of ethics have been published by authentic organs such as World Medical Association (WMA) (1); American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), American College of Physicians-American Society of Internal Medicine (ACP-ASIM), and European Federation of Internal Medicine (2). The Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) designated professionalism as one of six core competencies for resident physicians to demonstrate (3).In the special field like endocrineology, there have been special codes of ethics too. For instance, the Endocrine Society has provided ethical codes for medical conduct (4, 5). According to the Code of Ethics of the Endocrine Society, codes of ethics have aspirational, educational, and regulatory features; so they play the roles of identifying the highest standards of professional behavior, indicating to members what collective expectations for their individual behaviors are, and indicating and supporting the appropriate rules of behavior and issuing sanctions, on Abstract Advancements in different field of medicine have given rise to complex ethical dilemmas in clinical practice. The more the clinicians are sensitized to ethical problems and familiar with ethical decision-making, the more they can value professionalism in their practice. The current paper is designed to emphasize physicians to think ethically in the field of internal medicine and endocrinology. Being aware of the ethical issues and being sensitive to them are the first steps for ethical conduct. So, some important ethical issues will be described in brief, and an overview of professionalism and the principles of ethical decision making will be provided. Three ethical cases are included in order to make the discussion more practical.