Natural disasters and cholera outbreaks. Ebola, SARS, and concerns over pandemic flu. HIV and AIDS. E. coli outbreaks from contaminated produce and fast foods. Threats of bioterrorism. Contamination of compounded drugs. Vaccination refusals and outbreaks of preventable diseases. These are just some of the headlines from the last 30-plus years highlighting the essential roles and responsibilities of public health, all of which come with ethical issues and the responsibilities they create. P...

Medical ethics draws upon methods from a wide array of disciplines, including anthropology, economics, epidemiology, health services research, history, law, medicine, nursing, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and theology.In this influential book, outstanding scholars in medical ethics bring these many methods together in one place to be systematically described, critiqued, and challenged. Newly revised and updated chapters in this second edition include philosophy, religion and ...

Did you know...Medical interventions have become the third leading cause of death in America.An estimated 10 percent of Americans are implanted with medical devices -- like pacemakers, artificial hips, cardiac stents, etc.The overwhelming majority of high-risk implanted devices have never undergone a single clinical trial.In The Danger Within Us, award-winning journalist Jeanne Lenzer brings these horrifying statistics to life through the story of one w...

On January 22, 1979, an eleven-year-old Native girl died of a ruptured appendix in an Alert Bay, B.C. hospital. The events that followed are chronicled here by Dara Culhane Speck, a member by marriage of the Nimpkish Indian Band in Alert Bay. She has relied mainly on interviews, anecdotes and public records to describe how this small, isolated Native community took on the local hospital, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, provincial and federal ministries of health and national media,...

This book discusses and provides insight on the legal and ethical dilemmas of managing those with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). This book provides a clear perspective for those clinicians and legal professionals who are working with those with this disorder, and correspondingly increases their understanding when arranging effective supports for this population. Historically, the primary focus on FASD has been on children. However, this is a lifelong disorder and the implications ...

Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers uses insights from the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to rethink bioethics. Although Wittgenstein produced little formal writing on ethics, this volume shows that, in fact, ethical issues permeate the entirety of his work. The scholars whom Carl Elliott has assembled in this volume pay particular attention to Wittgenstein’s concern with the thick context of moral problems, his suspicion of theory, and his belief in description as the real aim of ...

What is the relationship between scientific research and ethics? Some think that science should be free from ethical and political considerations. Biomedical Research and Beyond argues that ethical guidance is essential for all forms of inquiry, including biomedical and scientific research. By addressing some of the most controversial questions of biomedical research, such as embryonic research, animal research, and genetic enhancement research, the author argues for a rich moral ...

In recent years, the human values at the heart of the nursing profession seem to have become side-lined by an increased focus on managerialist approaches to health care provision. Nursing's values are in danger of becoming marginalised further precisely because that which nursing does best - providing care and helping individuals through the human trauma of illness - is difficult to measure, and therefore plays little, if any, part in official accounts of outcome measures.Derek Sel...

Margaret Pabst Battin has established a reputation as one of the top philosophers working in bioethics today. This work is a sequel to Battin's 1994 volume The Least Worst Death. The last ten years have seen fast-moving developments in end-of-life issues, from the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in Oregon and the Netherlands to furor over proposed restrictions of scheduled drugs used for causing death, and the development of "NuTech" methods of assistance in dying. Batt...

In this groundbreaking work, leading philosophers, legal theorists, bioethicists, and policy makers offer incisive looks into the philosophical and moral foundations of disability law and policy.

Alasdair Maclean analyses the ethical basis for consent to medical treatment, providing both an extensive reconsideration of the ethical issues and a detailed examination of English law. Importantly, the analysis is given a context by situating consent at the centre of the healthcare professional-patient relationship. This allows the development of a relational model that balances the agency of the two parties with their obligations that arise from that relationship. That relational model ...

Technological developments in the life sciences confront us with new facets of a Faustian seduction. Are we „playing God“ more and more, as claimed by critical authors of modernity? Achievements in genetic research produce ethical dilemmas which need to be the subject of reflection and debate in modern societies. Denial of ambivalences that ethical dilemmas arouse constitutes a threat to societies as well as to individuals. The book presents a compilation of some of the results of the inte...