Literature Review
All posts tagged with “Ethics.”
Hastings Center welcomes 13 new fellows
01/26/24 at 04:00 AMHastings Center Welcomes 13 New FellowsPress release; 1/25/24The Hastings Center is pleased to announce the election of the 2023 fellows. Hastings Center fellows are a group of more than 200 individuals of outstanding accomplishment whose work has informed scholarship and public understanding of complex ethical issues in health, health care, science, and technology. The latest fellows focus on a broad range of topics with ethical implications, including digital technologies, public health, disparities at the end of life, disability rights, institutional racism, pain and addiction, and climate change.
Medical assistance in dying: What are we talking about?
01/04/24 at 04:00 AMMedical assistance in dying: What are we talking about?University of Oxford Practical Ethics, by Alberto Giubilini; 1/2/24Medical assistance in dying – or “MAID”, to use the somehow infelicitous acronym – is likely to be a central topic in bioethics this year. That might not be true of bioethics as an academic field, where MAID has been widely discussed over the past 40 years. But it is likely true of bioethics as a wider societal and political area of discussion. There are two reasons to think this. First, the topic has attracted a lot of attention the last year, especially with “slippery slope” concerns around Canada’s policies. Second, MAID has recently been in the news in the UK, where national elections will take place in 2024. It is not hard to imagine it will feature in the heated political polarization that always accompanies election campaigns.
Should patients be allowed to die from anorexia?
01/04/24 at 03:00 AMShould patients be allowed to die from anorexia?DNYUZ; 1/3/24The doctors told Naomi that she could not leave the hospital. She was lying in a narrow bed at Denver Health Medical Center. Someone said something about a judge and a court order. Someone used the phrase “gravely disabled.” Naomi did not think she was gravely disabled. Still, she decided not to fight it. She could deny that she was mentally incompetent — but this would probably just be taken as proof of her mental incompetence. Of her lack of insight. She would, instead, “succumb to it.” [Read more of Naomi's story, followed by this examination of palliative care.]The field of palliative care was developed in the 1960s and ’70s, as a way to minister to dying cancer patients. Palliative care offered “comfort measures,” like symptom management and spiritual guidance, as opposed to curative treatment, for people who were in pain and would never get better. Later, the field expanded beyond oncology and end-of-life care — to reach patients with serious medical illnesses like heart disease, H.I.V. and AIDS, kidney failure, A.L.S. and dementia. Some people who receive palliative care are still fighting their diseases; in these cases, the treatment works to mitigate their suffering. [Read more of this discussion of emerging issue.]