agreed-upon moral precepts, such as telling the truth and not harming others, are rules for living together that any intelligent gregarious beings would put into their social contracts, needing no divine sanction. In contrast, little good can come from parochial doctrines that cannot be justifi ed by universal standards of reason. Coyne doesn’t dwell on obvious historical disasters, such as rel...

The study by Lapane and Quilliam published in this issue of Journal of the American Medical Directors Association explores an important issue in social science methodology, namely, how to distribute resident safety perception questionnaires among nursing home employees in a manner that will yield the highest response rate (and presumably the most reliable data). From a social policy and clinica...

In 1974 the first American Heart Association (AHA) and Emergency Cardiac Care (ECC) standards for resuscitation were published. At that time only a few of the recommended measures were based on scientific evidence, but the medical world accepted them as international precepts that formed the gold standard for resuscitation care. Although they had been evolved only on the basis of national exper...

BACKGROUND Providing health services is described as an important moral measure, since its major aim is to ensure the welfare of the people who need treatment and care. Moral sensitivity is the ability to identify the existing moral problem and understand the moral consequences of the decisions made on the patient's part. Physicians are always exposed to moral distress due to various circumstan...

Relatively little consideration has heretofore been given to the interaction between Western clinical research ethics and non-Western ethical expectations. How should any conflict that might arise when a biomedical investigator and a research subject come from different cultural settings and have different ethical expectations be addressed? Which ethics should govern such trans-cultural clinica...

During this workshop, held as part of a joint Nutrition Society and Food Standards Agency (Agency) meeting on Micronutrient interactions and public health, several precepts for a successful funding application to the Agency were discussed. These precepts, many of which can be used as guiding principles for project proposals to other funding bodies, are summarised as follows: remember that the A...