As the state of the natural world declines, environmentally related health problems will increasingly shape the landscape of human health and disease. The confluence of several global trends - rapid population growth combined with an even more dramatic increase in natural resource consumption - drives ecological deterioration, and this in turn poses serious challenges to health. U.S. medicine and bioethics have too long ignored the relevance of these global trends to health care. This groundbreaking work is a call to attention. It brings bioethics and health care squarely into the 21st century.

The book shows how environmental decline relates to human health and to health care practices in the U.S. and other industrialized countries. It outlines the environmental trends that will strongly affect health, and challenges us to see the connections between ways of practicing medicine and the very envrionmental problems that damage ecosystems and make people sick. In addition to philosophical analysis of the converging values of bioethics and environmental ethics, the book offers case studies as well as a number of practical suggestions for moving health care toward sustainability. The exploration of a hypothetical Green Health Center, in particular, offers an intellectual and moral framework for talking about environmental values in health care. Engaging and challenging, this book will appeal not only to health professionals and philosophers, but to anyone concerned about how to preserve and promote both human health and the health of the natural world.

This is the Second Edition of a well-received book that reflects a fresh, integrated coverage of the concepts and scientific measurement of stress and welfare of animals including humans. This book explains the basic biological principles of coping with many forms of adversity. The major part of this work is devoted to explaining scientifically usable concepts in stress and welfare. A wide range of welfare indicators are highlighted in detail with examples being drawn from man and other species. The necessity for combining information from disciplines is emphasized with a one-health, one-welfare approach. This information forms the basis for a synthesis of new ideas. Among the issues covered are: - How brain and body systems regulate using feelings, physiological responses, behaviour and responses to pathology - Limits to adaptation - Assessing positive and negative welfare during both short-term and long-term situations - Ethical problems and suggested solutions A proper assessment of animal welfare is essential to take informed decisions about what is morally acceptable in terms of practice and in the development of a more effective legislation. This work encapsulates a very wide body of literature on scientific aspects of animal welfare and will thus prove a valuable asset for animal welfare scientists, psychologists, students and teachers of all forms of biology, behaviour, medicine, veterinary medicine and animal usage.

This book provides a current analysis of the legal and ethical challenges in preparing for and responding to chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive (CBRNE) crises. From past events like the Chernobyl nuclear incident in Russia or the Bhopal chemical calamity in India, to the more recent tsunami and nuclear accident in Japan or the Ebola crisis in Africa, and with the on-going threat of bioterrorism, the need to be ready to respond to CBRNE crises is uncontroversial. What is controversial is whether we are on a path that adequately prepares us for the next event. The ethical and legal scholars in this volume hold that much work remains to be done and offer this book to stimulate further reflection and dialogue around CBRNE crises. This is an indispensable book for both students and scholars of bioethics, international law, public health, as well as for regulators and administrators developing policy and legislation related to public health planning and emergency responses.

As DNA forensic profiling and databasing become established as key technologies in the toolbox of the forensic sciences, their expanding use raises important issues that promise to touch everyone's lives. In an authoritative global investigation of a diverse range of countries, including those at the forefront of these technologies' development and use, this book identifies and provides critical reflection upon the many issues of privacy; distributive justice; DNA information system ownership; biosurveillance; function creep; the reliability of collection, storage and analysis of DNA profiles; the possibility of transferring medical DNA information to forensics databases; and democratic involvement and transparency in governance, an emergent key theme. This book is timely and significant in providing the essential background and discussion of the ethical, legal and societal dimensions for academics, practitioners, public interest and criminal justice organisations, and students of the life sciences, law, politics, and sociology.

There is a common misconception that our genomes - all unique, except for those in identical twins - have the upper hand in controlling our destiny. The latest genetic discoveries, however, do not support that view. Although genetic variation does influence differences in various human behaviours to a greater or lesser degree, most of the time this does not undermine our genuine free will. Genetic determinism comes into play only in various medical conditions, notably some psychiatric syndromes. Denis Alexander here demonstrates that we are not slaves to our genes. He shows how a predisposition to behave in certain ways is influenced at a molecular level by particular genes. Yet a far greater influence on our behaviours is our world-views that lie beyond science - and that have an impact on how we think the latest genetic discoveries should, or should not, be applied. Written in an engaging style, Alexander's book offers tools for understanding and assessing the latest genetic discoveries critically.

There is a common misconception that our genomes - all unique, except for those in identical twins - have the upper hand in controlling our destiny. The latest genetic discoveries, however, do not support that view. Although genetic variation does influence differences in various human behaviours to a greater or lesser degree, most of the time this does not undermine our genuine free will. Genetic determinism comes into play only in various medical conditions, notably some psychiatric syndromes. Denis Alexander here demonstrates that we are not slaves to our genes. He shows how a predisposition to behave in certain ways is influenced at a molecular level by particular genes. Yet a far greater influence on our behaviours is our world-views that lie beyond science - and that have an impact on how we think the latest genetic discoveries should, or should not, be applied. Written in an engaging style, Alexander's book offers tools for understanding and assessing the latest genetic discoveries critically.

Having children is probably as old as the first successful organism. It is often done thoughtlessly. This book is an argument for giving procreating some serious thought, and a theory of how, when, and why procreation may be permissible. procreative ethics, procreation itself is often done Rivka Weinberg begins with an analysis of the kind of act procreativity is and why we might be justifiably motivated to engage in it. She then proceeds to argue that, by virtue of our ownership and control of the hazardous material that is our gametes, we are parentally responsible for the risks we take with our gametes and for the persons that develop when we engage in activity that allows our gametes to unite with others and develop into persons. Further argument establishes that when done respectfully, and in cases where the child's chances of leading a life of human flourishing are high, procreation may be permissible. procreating some serious thought, and a theory of how, when, Along the way, Weinberg argues that the non-identity problem is a curiously common mistake. Arguments intending to show that procreation is impermissible because life is bad for people and imposed on them without their consent are shown to have serious flaws. Yet because they leave us with lingering concerns, Weinberg argues that although procreation is permissible under certain conditions, it is not only a welfare risk but also a moral risk. Still, it is a risk that is often permissible for us to take and impose, given our high level of legitimate interest in procreativity. In order to ascertain when the procreative risk is permissible to impose, contractualist principles are proposed to fairly attend to the interests prospective parents have in procreating and the interests future people have in a life of human flourishing. The principles are assessed on their own merits and in comparison with rival principles. They are then applied to a wide variety of procreative cases.

This open access volume is the first academic book on the controversial issue of including spiritual care in integrated electronic medical records (EMR). Based on an international study group comprising researchers from Europe (The Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland), the United States, Canada, and Australia, this edited collection provides an overview of different charting practices and experiences in various countries and healthcare contexts. Encompassing case studies and analyses of theological, ethical, legal, healthcare policy, and practical issues, the volume is a groundbreaking reference for future discussion, research, and strategic planning for inter- or multi-faith healthcare chaplains and other spiritual care providers involved in the new field of documenting spiritual care in EMR. Topics explored among the chapters include: Spiritual Care Charting/Documenting/Recording/Assessment Charting Spiritual Care: Psychiatric and Psychotherapeutic Aspects Palliative Chaplain Spiritual Assessment Progress Notes Charting Spiritual Care: Ethical Perspectives Charting Spiritual Care in Digital Health: Analyses and Perspectives Charting Spiritual Care: The Emerging Role of Chaplaincy Records in Global Health Care is an essential resource for researchers in interprofessional spiritual care and healthcare chaplaincy, healthcare chaplains and other spiritual caregivers (nurses, physicians, psychologists, etc.), practical theologians and health ethicists, and church and denominational representatives.

Peter Angelos Numerous ethical issues arise in the care of oncology patients. Although much has been written in the last several decades on ethical issues in caring for patients, few volumes have sought to focus the exploration on ethical issues particularly relevant to the care of cancer patients. In 1999, the first edition of this book was published. Since that time, many changes have occurred in how some cancers are diagnosed and treated, but the central ethical issues have continued to challenge patients, families, and their health care providers. All of the chapters from the prior edition have been updated and there are seven new chapters in this expanded edition. In this second edition, the perspectives on what is an ethical issue have been broadened by bringing authors of differing backgrounds into the discussion. In Chapter 1, the perspective of a cancer patient is provided as an open letter to physicians. Although Parvez Kamangar is providing only one patient's perspective, this is an essential voice that is not often heard in texts on medical ethics. In Chapters 2 and 3, the issues of communication and the physician-patient relationship are explored in order to better understand how the needs of patients and families can be met. In Chapter 4, Professor Tod Chambers highlights the challenges to providing ethical care to patients in a multicultural society.

How ought the law to deal with novel challenges regarding the use and control of human biomaterials? As it stands the law is ill-equipped to deal with these. Quigley argues that advancing biotechnology means that the law must confront and move boundaries which it has constructed; in particular, those which delineate property from non-property in relation to biomaterials. Drawing together often disparate strands of property discourse, she offers a philosophical and legal re-analysis of the law in relation to property in the body and biomaterials. She advances a new defence, underpinned by self-ownership, of the position that persons ought to be seen as the prima facie holders of property rights in their separated biomaterials. This book will appeal to those interested in medical and property law, philosophy, bioethics, and health policy amongst others.

New technological innovations offer significant opportunities to promote and protect human rights. At the same time, they also pose undeniable risks. In some areas, they may even be changing what we mean by human rights. The fact that new technologies are often privately controlled raises further questions about accountability and transparency and the role of human rights in regulating these actors. This volume - edited by Molly K. Land and Jay D. Aronson - provides an essential roadmap for understanding the relationship between technology and human rights law and practice. It offers cutting-edge analysis and practical strategies in contexts as diverse as autonomous lethal weapons, climate change technology, the Internet and social media, and water meters. This title is also available as Open Access.

This handbook explores the ways biomedicine and pop culture interact while simultaneously introducing the reader with the tools and ideas behind this new field of enquiry. From comic books to health professionals, from the arts to genetics, from sci-fi to medical education, from TV series to ethics, it offers different entry points to an exciting and central aspect of contemporary culture: how and what we learn about (and from) scientific knowledge and its representation in pop culture. Divided into three sections the handbook surveys the basics, the micro-, and the macroaspects of this interaction between specialized knowledge and cultural production: After the introduction of basic concepts of and approaches to the topic from a variety of disciplines, the respective theories and methods are applied in specific case studies. The final section is concerned with larger social and historical trends of the use of biomedical knowledge in popular culture. Presenting over twenty-five original articles from international scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds, this handbook introduces the topic of pop culture and biomedicine to both new and mature researchers alike. The articles, all complete with a rich source of further references, are aimed at being a sincere entry point to researchers and academic educators interested in this somewhat unexplored field of culture and biomedicine.

This book offers a new perspective on advance directives through a combined legal, ethical and philosophical inquiry. In addition to making a significant and novel theoretical contribution to the field, the book has an interdisciplinary and international appeal. The book will help academics, healthcare professionals, legal practitioners and the educated reader to understand the challenges of creating and implementing advance directives, anticipate clinical realities, and preparing advance directives that reflect a higher degree of assurance in terms of implementation.

This open access book provides an extensive review of ethical and regulatory issues related to human infection challenge studies, with a particular focus on the expansion of this type of research into endemic settings and/or low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Human challenge studies (HCS) involve the intentional infection of research participants, and this type of research is rapidly increasing in frequency worldwide. HCS are widely considered to be an especially promising approach to vaccine development, including for pathogens endemic to LMICs. However, challenge studies are sometimes controversial and raise complex ethical issues, some of which are especially salient in endemic and/or LMIC settings. Informed by qualitative interviews with experts in infectious diseases and bioethics, this book highlights areas of ethical consensus and controversy concerning this kind of research. As the first volume to focus on ethical issues associated with human challenge studies, it sets the agenda for further work in this important area of global health research; contributes to current debates in research ethics; and aims to inform regulatory policy and research practice. Insofar as it focuses on HCS in (endemic) settings where diseases are present and/or widespread, much of the analysis provided here is directly relevant to HCS involving pandemic diseases including COVID19.

This book summarizes the contributions at an April 2016 conference held at Albany Medical College, Reproductive Ethics: New Challenges and Conversations. Reproductive ethics does not suffer from a lack of challenging issues, yet a few "hot button" issues such as abortion and surrogacy seem to attract most of the attention, while other issues and dilemmas remain relatively underdeveloped in bioethics literature. The goal of this book is to explore and expand the range of topics addressed in reproductive ethics. This is a multi-disciplinary book bringing together philosophers, clinicians, sociologists, anthropologists, and other scholars whose research or clinical interests touch reproductive issues. The results of this compilation are a comprehensive and unique discussion of the evolving issues in the rapidly changing field. The majority of the popular reproductive ethics anthologies were published at least 10 years ago. The field of reproductive ethics would benefit from a new anthology that addresses some of the perennial dilemmas in reproductive ethics (e.g. abortion, sex selection) from updated perspectives and that also covers new technologies that have emerged only in the last few years, such as social egg freezing.

The use of the criminal law to punish those who transmit disease is a topical and controversial issue. To date, the law, and the related academic literature, has largely focused on HIV transmission. With contributions from leading practitioners and international scholars from a variety of disciplines, this volume explores the broader question of if and when it is appropriate to criminalise the transmission of contagion. The scope and application of the laws in jurisdictions such as Canada, the United Kingdom and Norway are considered, historical comparisons are examined, and options for the further development of the law are proposed.

This book observes the idea of race as a false representation for the cause of disease. Race-based medicine, an emerging field in pharmacology, aims to create a specialty market based on racial groups. Within this market, the drug BiDil set a precedent in this area of medicine targeting African Americans as its first racial group. Consequently, selecting African Americans as a "starter group" led to ethical questions regarding the motive behind race-based medicine within the context of the larger treatment of blacks in American medical history. This book therefore links medicine and American eugenics, examines race-based medicine's influence on the perception of the black body, traces the influence of BiDil's approval on the resurgence of race-based medicine, and assesses the black church's response to race-based medicine using black liberation theology as a means to social justice.

This book discusses 'how' to respectfully and responsibly include pregnant women in clinical research. In sharp contrast, the existing literature predominantly focuses on the reasons 'why' the inclusion of pregnant women in clinical research is necessary - viz., to develop effective treatments for women during pregnancy, to promote fetal safety, to reduce harm to women and fetuses from suboptimal care, and to allow access to the benefits of research participation. This book supports the shift to a new default position, whereby pregnant women are included in clinical research unless researchers argue convincingly for their exclusion. This shift raises many as yet unexplored ethical and policy questions about existing barriers to the equitable inclusion of pregnant women in research. This book is original in three key ways. First, it presents an unparalleled depth of analysis of the ethics of research with pregnant women, bringing together many of the key authors in this field as well as experts in research ethics and in vulnerability who have not previously applied their work to pregnant women. Second, it includes innovative theoretical work in ethics and disease specific case studies that highlight the current complexity and future challenges of research involving pregnant women. Third, the book brings together authors who argue both for and against including more pregnant women in formal clinical trials.

In times of global economic and political crises, the notion of solidarity is gaining new currency. This book argues that a solidarity-based perspective can help us to find new ways to address pressing problems. Exemplified by three case studies from the field of biomedicine: databases for health and disease research, personalised healthcare, and organ donation, it explores how solidarity can make a difference in how we frame problems, and in the policy solutions that we can offer.

When data from all aspects of our lives can be relevant to our health - from our habits at the grocery store and our Google searches to our FitBit data and our medical records - can we really differentiate between big data and health big data? Will health big data be used for good, such as to improve drug safety, or ill, as in insurance discrimination? Will it disrupt health care (and the health care system) as we know it? Will it be possible to protect our health privacy? What barriers will there be to collecting and utilizing health big data? What role should law play, and what ethical concerns may arise? This timely, groundbreaking volume explores these questions and more from a variety of perspectives, examining how law promotes or discourages the use of big data in the health care sphere, and also what we can learn from other sectors.

Bioethics has long been accepted as an interdisciplinary field. The recent 'empirical turn' in bioethics is, however, creating challenges that move beyond those of simple interdisciplinary collaboration, as researchers grapple with the methodological, empirical and meta-ethical challenges of combining the normative and the empirical, as well as navigating the difficulties that can arise from attempts to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries. Empirical Bioethics: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives brings together contributions from leading experts in the field which speak to these challenges, providing insight into how they can be understood and suggestions for how they might be overcome. Combining discussions of meta-ethical challenges, examples of different methodologies for integrating empirical and normative research, and reflection on the challenges of conducting and publishing such work, this book will both introduce the novice to the field and challenge the expert.

New technological innovations offer significant opportunities to promote and protect human rights. At the same time, they also pose undeniable risks. In some areas, they may even be changing what we mean by human rights. The fact that new technologies are often privately controlled raises further questions about accountability and transparency and the role of human rights in regulating these actors. This volume - edited by Molly K. Land and Jay D. Aronson - provides an essential roadmap for understanding the relationship between technology and human rights law and practice. It offers cutting-edge analysis and practical strategies in contexts as diverse as autonomous lethal weapons, climate change technology, the Internet and social media, and water meters. This title is also available as Open Access.

Conscience in Reproductive Health Care responds to the growing worldwide trend of health care professionals conscientiously refusing to provide abortions and similar reproductive health services in countries where these services are legal and professionally accepted. Carolyn McLeod argues that conscientious objectors in health care should prioritize the interests of patients in receiving care over their own interest in acting on their conscience. She defends this "prioritizing approach" to conscientious objection over the more popular "compromise approach" without downplaying the importance of health care professionals having a conscience or the moral complexity of their conscientious refusals. McLeod's central argument is that health care professionals who are gatekeepers of services such as abortions are fiduciaries for their patients and for the public they are licensed to serve. As such, they owe a duty of loyalty to these beneficiaries and should give primacy to their beneficiaries' interests in accessing care. This conclusion is informed by what McLeod believes is morally at stake for the main parties to the conflicts generated by conscientious refusals: the objector and the patient. What is at stake, according to McLeod, depends on the relevant socio-political context, but typically includes the objector's integrity and the patient's interest in avoiding harm.

This volume addresses the proper character of patient informed consent to medical treatment and clinical research. The goal is critically to explore the current individually oriented approach to informed consent which grew out of the dominant bioethics movement that arose in the United States in the 1970s. In contrast to that individually oriented approach, this volume explores the importance of family-oriented approaches to informed consent for medical treatment and clinical research. It draws on both East Asian moral resources as well as a critical response to the ways in which the practice of informed consent has developed in the United States

With a focus on end-of-life discussion in aging and chronically ill populations, this book offers insight into the skill of communicating in complex and emotionally charged discussions. This text is written for all clinicians and professionals in the fields of healthcare and public health who are faced with questions of ethical deliberation when a patient's illness turns from chronic to terminal. This skill is required to manage care well in an age of advanced technology, and numerous autonomous choices. With a palliative care and ethics focus, the manuscript provides case studies illustrating issues which occur in the acuity and chronicity of end of life. Clear tools for clinicians, such as scripting and "the advance care planning video library" are included. The book focuses on the unique concept of outpatient ethics, including readmission prevention and shortened length of stay through good communication for clinicians who will be required to conduct this discussion with patients. The ethical undertone in this text provides a perfect opening for application in healthcare ethics classes, both in fields of public health and healthcare. Medical scholars and physicians, nurse practitioners and physician's assistants, as well as social workers, both in practice and training, will benefit from this text.