Medical ethics

Ética, Persona y Sociedad

Due date: 08/March/10
Second Partial Project: “Medical Ethics”
In this project we will talk about ethics and it’s relation with medicine. As it’s known medicine has many aspects that can’t be decided in an objective way and there exists a lot of ethical dilemmas related with it that are polemic even in our days.

You will see different ethical dilemmas aseuthanasia and organs donation, that are themes studied by bioethics, a part of ethics dedicated specifically to the things related to life in general, it doesn’t only include medicine, as many people think, it also includes every kind of living creature. Here we will focus in the part of bioethics dedicated to resolve the medical issues.

When we talk about ethics in medicine, we should follow a basicethics principle that Kant defined as human dignity, it talks about the rights that every person has just because they are human, we all have our value and it’s the same for everyone. In theory when we talk about medicine it doesn’t matter which kind of illness a person has or when they will die, the decision taken by the doctor is supposed to be fair in any case.

However, as we can see inthis project, in practice things get complicated and involve different kind of issues, and don’t happen as they are supposed to. Doctors usually chose, when they have to give an organ or when they have to make a cardiovascular resuscitation, the person that has more probability to survive and let the others die. Maybe in theory is easier to know what is right and what isn’t, but in real life; howcan we know if a medical practice is ethical or it isn’t? This is the mainly point to discuss in this project.

Relevance of Ethics in medicine

We see it in newspapers and local news channels almost everyday. How many times have you seen a report about someone who is in a vegetable state or in a severe coma, but cannot be helped to end his or her life by “pulling the plug” because it’sillegal? Or, for instance, how many times have you heard about someone who needs an organ transplant to survive a deadly disease, but must wait in line for months before actually receiving one? Yes, medical dilemmas have increasingly become a popular choice for the media to cover. Doctors all over the world constantly have to face these difficult decisions. Whether it’s on a local, national or aninternational basis, the issues are very similar. However, they might be solved differently, according to the place.
In the medical world, there is a special hierarchy when it comes to solve medical dilemmas. On the bottom of this pyramid are the local medical ‘authorities’. The first people that a dilemma is presented to are a special board of doctors of the hospital in which a particular patient hasbeen admitted. For example, if a patient is on the waiting list to receive an organ transplant but suddenly need one right away, this special board of doctors is the one that gets to decide if they give the patient a new heart or not. Every hospital has its own ethical guidelines that must be followed inside the institution, but may vary between each hospital. Thus, an ethical dilemma may beapproach differently in each hospital because they have their own code of ethics. On a bigger scale, there are also national medical associations that deal with these situations.
“The American Medical Association helps doctors help patients by uniting physicians nationwide to work on the most important professional and public health issues.” AMA is a national organization that deals with the toughestmedical dilemmas in the whole country. It consists of a group of selected doctors from all over the country that decides together the outcome of a medical issue. The American Medical Association has its own Code of Medical Ethics that every doctor and medical institution in the United States is obliged to follow. Furthermore, the AMA has the final say in any medical issue inside the limits of...