Medicine, Power, and the Law demonstrates that criminal and civil justice interact with medicine and public health more than is presently understood. The book focuses on the role of healthcare practitioners and an array of other professionals across industries in identifying wrongdoers, reporting behavior, and testifying on behalf of the state or government agencies. It also covers circumstances in which law enforcement relies on medicine for evidence or support in ways that compromise medical ethics. By reporting or testifying as experts, a range of people, from specialist pediatricians to flight attendants, can have a life-changing impact on individuals in the name of public health or medicine. People who work in hospitals, social work settings, and even airlines, often contribute to wrongful and aggressive criminal and civil actions against society's most vulnerable people, including parents, older adults, and people living with poverty. The book explores a number of examples, including police use of medicine as a restraint or the collection of blood as evidence and the risks of opting out of certain scientific discoveries, such as pharmaceuticals. It describes the harms that may come to those who engage in suboptimal but generally heretofore legal child-raising behaviors, and people opting to live independently as older adults. These can lead to civil and criminal charges when noticed by those in a position of power. Medicine, Power, and the Law is an important contribution for researchers and practitioners in medicine, the law, and the expanding field of bioethics.

This new book reviews the legal, ethical, risk management and safety issues facing today's radiological science professional. It discusses theories and their day-to-day application, guiding good decision making. Case studies and scenarios clearly illustrate concepts. Sample forms at the end of the text help readers prepare and draft forms, charts, procedures, and policies.Covers a full range of issues - decision making, malpractice, patients' rights, civil liability, record keeping, communication, education, and much more. Clarifies the importance of risk management and the need for developing a quality safety program to protect the patient, the practitioner, and the facility.Considers the practical applications of the Code of Ethics. Answers key questions about employment law.Presents specific plans for setting up education and evaluation programs. Includes sample forms for assessing competency. Provides an overview of the legal system and how it affects imaging and therapy.Offers two complete chapters that explain what and how to document. Includes sample forms for documentation and consent. Readers can simply review and adapt to their own health care settings.Features contributions by professionals with special expertise in law, risk management and education.

A timely overview of ethics, emphasizing applications to biomedical researchers, health providers, and administrators There are no simple rules to guide ethical conduct in daily practice, health professionals must have a basic understanding of several topics including ethical theories; ethical scandals; laws, regulations, and institutional policies; and public perceptions. This book can be used for self-study, for classroom instruction, and as a refresher and update by practicing health professionals. The chapters have learning objectives, focused content, a summary of important points, a quiz, and a list of key references. Although the book is arranged in a logical order, each chapter may be studied independently.

The realities and misconceptions of long-term care and the challenges it presents for the ethics of autonomy are analyzed in this perceptive work. While defending the concept of autonomy, the author argues that the standard view of autonomy as non-interference and independence has only a limited applicability for long-term care. He explains that autonomy should be understood as a comprehensiveness that defines the overall course of a person's life rather than as a way of responding to an isolated situation. Agich distinguishes actual and ideal autonomy and argues that actual autonomy is better revealed in the everyday experiences of long-term care than in dramatic, conflict-ridden paradigm situations such as decisions to institutionalize, to initiate aggressive treatments, or to withhold or to withdraw life-sustaining treatments. Through a phenomenological analysis of long-term care, he develops an ethical framework for it by showing how autonomy is actually manifest in certain structural features of the social world of long-term care. Throughout this timely work, the rich sociological and anthropological literature on aging and long-term care is referenced and the practical ethical questions of promoting and enhancing the exercise of autonomy are addressed.

This volume reviews the state of the art in caring for patients dying in the ICU, focusing on both clinical aspects of managing pain and other symptoms, as well as ethical and societal issues that affect the standards of care recieved, The book also addresses the changing epidemiology of death in this setting related to managed care, practical skills needed to provide the highest quality of care to terminal patients, communicating with patients and families, the mechanics of withdrawing life supporting therapies, and the essential role of palliative care specialists in the ICU. The book briefly describes unique issues that arise when caring for patients with some of the more common diseases that preciptate death in the ICU. Contributors for the book were chosed because they have experience caring for patients in the ICU, and are also doing curent research to find ways to improve care for terminal patients in this setting.

Public health is an important and fast-developing area of ethical discussion. In this volume a range of issues in public health ethics are explored using the resources of moral theory, political philosophy, philosophy of science, applied ethics, law, and economics. The twelve original papers presented consider numerous ethical issues arise within public health ethics. To what extent can the public good or the public interest justify state interventions that impose limits upon the freedom of individuals? What role should the law play in regulating risks? Should governments actively aim to change our preferences about such things as food, smoking or physical exercise? What are public goods, and what role (if any) do they play in public health? To what extent do individuals have moral obligations to contribute to protecting the community or the public good? Where is it appropriate to concentrate upon prevention rather than cure? Given the fact that we cannot be protected from all harm, what sorts of harm provide a justification for public health action? What limits do we wish to place upon public health activities? How do we ensure that the interests of individuals are not set aside or forgotten in the pursuit of population benefits? An excellent line-up of authors from North America, Europe, and the UK tackle these questions.

As society struggles to cope with the many repercussions of assisted life and death, the evening news is filled with stories of legal battles over frozen embryos and the possible prosecution of doctors for their patients' suicide. Using an "institutional" approach as an alternative to the prevailing "rights" based analysis of problems in law and medicine, this study explains why society should resist the tendency to look to science and law for a resolution of intimate matters, such as how our children are born and how we die. Palmer's institutional approach demonstrates that legislative analysis is often more important than judicial analysis when it comes to issues raised by new reproductive technologies and physician-assisted suicide. A reliance on individual rights alone for answers to the complex ethical questions that result from society's faith in scientific progress and science's close alliance with medicine will be insufficient and ill-advised. Palmer predicts that the key role of the family as a societal institution will mean that questions of assisted reproduction will be resolved more in response to market forces than through legal intervention. However, he does support a strong role for legislatures in decisions involving the physicians' role in our deaths. These findings are based on the differing views of the Supreme Court justices in these matters: a tendency to protect family formation from state interference (as in abortion decisions), but support of a legislative obligation to control medicine (assisted suicide). According to Palmer, recent Supreme Court decisions on physician assisted suicide usher in a new era in how legal institutions will resolve biomedical dilemmas.

Informed consent - as an ethical ideal and legal doctrine - has been the source of much concern to clinicians. Drawing on a diverse set of backgrounds and two decades of research in clinical settings, the authors - a lawyer, a physician, a social scientist, and a philosopher - help clinicians understand and cope with their legal obligations and show how the proper handling of informed consent can improve , rather than impede, patient care. Following a concise review of the ethical and legal foundations of informed consent, they provide detailed, practical suggestions for incorporating informed consent into clinical practice. This completely revised and updated edition discusses how to handle informed consent in all phases of the updated edition discusses how to handle informed consent in all phases of the doctor-patient relationship, use of consent forms, patients' refusals of treatment, and consent to research. It comments on recent laws and national policy, and addresses cutting edge issues such as fulfilling physician obligations under managed care. This clear and succinct book contains a weath of information that will not only help clinicians meet the legal requirements of informed consent and understand its ethical underpinnings, but also enhance their ability to deal with their patients more effectively. It will be of value to all those working in areas where issues of informed consent are likely to arise, including medicine, biomedical research, mental health care, nursing, dentistry, biomedical ethics, and law.

This book constructs a virtue-based ethics for medicine and health care. Beginning with the problem of relating virtues to principles, the authors develop a theory that this linkage lies in the goals of medicine and the nature of medical practice as a moral community. Specific virtues such as trust, compassion, prudence, justice, courage, temperance, and self-effacement are discussed in separate chapters. The book ends by examining how a virtue-based ethic of medicine makes a difference in analysing problems like caring for the poor, research on human subjects, whether the medical virtues can be taught in professional training, and how a refurbished philosophy of medicine can enhance medicine and health care in the future.

Students and professional nurses at any level of clinical practice will find this book to be a vital resource on the basic legal concepts and principles of malpractice, liability, and risk management, and their implications for the profession. The book also provides detailed strategies for dealing with these issues. The content is also highly relevant to practitioners in all other health care and legal disciplines that collaborate in the delivery of health care. Issues discussed include the expanding and evolving roles for professional nurses and the concomitant legal accountability and risk for liability, the increasing incidence of nurses named as defendants in malpractice lawsuits, anticipated changes in our health care delivery system, and breakthroughs in science and technology that will present new legal questions. The book also includes material on other important facets of today's nursing practice, including the growing phenomenon of tele-nursing, the essentials of malpractice insurance, and the legal significance of documentation and patients' medical records. It helps the reader identify the nurse at risk for a malpractice suit and the characteristics of the patient likely to sue. The appendices provide information on state laws concerned with access to medical records, a list of useful websites, a list of state boards of nursing, and a glossary of important terms.

Translational Medicine: Tools and Techniques provides a standardized path from basic research to the clinic and brings together various policy and practice issues to simplify the broad interdisciplinary field. With discussions from academic and industry leaders at international institutions who have successfully implemented translational medicine techniques and tools in various settings, readers will be guided through implementation strategies relevant to their own needs and institutions. The book also addresses regulatory processes in USA, EU, Japan and China. By providing details on omics sciences techniques, biomarkers, data mining and management approaches, case reports from industry, and tools to assess the value of different technologies and techniques, this book is the first to provide a user-friendly go-to guide for key opinion leaders (KOLs), industry administrators, faculty members, clinicians, researchers, and students interested in translational medicine.

As the American population ages, health care for the elderly grows in importance. This bibliography overviews the most significant books and journal articles on the ethical issues related to health care for older Americans. The topics covered are of interest to practitioners and the general public alike, as well as to professionals from a wide range of fields. The author has provided more than five hundred bibliographic citations. These entries are arranged in eleven topical chapters to facilitate use by the reader. Each citation is accompanied by an annotation that concisely summarizes and assesses the contents of the work. The volume begins with an informative introductory essay on the ethical issues pertinent to health care for older adults. The chapters that follow are devoted to broad topics, such as financial considerations, treatment for the terminally ill, and decision-making by and for the impaired elderly. The work concludes with author and subject indexes that add to its utility. Researchers and practitioners from all fields will find this work an indispensable guide to the wealth of literature on the ethical aspects of health care for older Americans.

Noted economist Douglas Vickers reexamines the relationship between economics and moral philosophy. That relationship, once very strong, is again the subject of increasing attention and discussion both within and beyond the academy. Vickers reestablishes the substantial bridges between ethical philosophy and economics. He addresses three main issues: first, the historical means by which economics has consciously surrendered its original association with ethical categories and criteria; second, the need to articulate the appropriate thoughtforms and vocabulary of ethical theory; and third, the illustration of areas in economics where ethical awareness is desirable and should be allowed to exert influence. This work is a major analysis which will be of considerable interest to economists, the business community, government regulators, and all concerned with economic decisionmaking in modern society.

As a critical examination of the pervasive tension existing between defensive medicine and good, ethical patient care, this book investigates the impact of legalities on medical treatment. Physicians today are apprehensive about the threat of malpractice suits. Kapp explores the extent to which this fear is justified. He examines where physicians get their ideas about what the law forbids and requires, how physicians' perceptions of the law and medicine affect medical care, and whether these behavioral manifestations benefit or hurt a physician's ability to practice ethically. Kapp then suggests ways medical professionals can resolve tension caused by conflicting demands and encourage more ethical care.

This book offers a theoretical and practical overview of the specific ethical and legal issues in pediatric organ transplantation. Written by a team of leading experts, Ethical Issues in Pediatric Organ Transplantation addresses those difficult ethical questions concerning clinical, organizational, legal and policy issues including donor, recipient and allocation issues. Challenging topics, including children as donors, donation after cardiac death, misattributed paternity, familial conflicts of interest, developmental disability as a listing criteria, small bowel transplant, and considerations in navigating the media are discussed. It serves as a fundamental handbook and resource for pediatricians, transplant health care professionals, trainees, graduate students, scholars, practitioners of bioethics and health policy makers.

Walton offers a comprehensive, flexible model for physician-patient decision making, the first such tool designed to be applied at the level of each particular case. Based on Aristotelian practical reasoning, it develops a method of reasonable dialogue, a question- and-answer process of interaction leading to informed consent on the part of the patient, and to a decision--mutually arrived at--reflecting both high medical standards and the patient's felt needs. After setting forth his model, he applies it to three vital ethical issues: acts of omission, the cessation of treatment, and possible side effects of treatments. In the final chapter, Walton shows how his method functions in light of the real-life complexities of the clinical encounter and how it bears on ethical questions concerning health-care policy, attitudes toward treatment and toward the medical profession, reasonableness of expectations, and the setting of realistic goals of treatment.

This book addresses the pressing issues involved with the ethical conduct of research in one developing world region - the Arab Region. Clinical research has soared in the developing world -as pharmaceutical companies continue their search for regions with large, treatment naive populations - including the Arab region, and has profound implications for the health and the economies for the area. The ethical issues involved with the conduct of such research, however, have so far not been adequately addressed. This volume presents the issues regarding research ethics and research governance that have relevance for health authorities, regulators, industry, and academia. As a multi-authored volume it includes both international and local experts on ethical issues in research, representing all stakeholders, thus presenting a balanced view on this timely topic.

Dr. James Hansen's vision and insight regarding the nature of the health care crisis evolved from positions of medical staff leadership, teaching, participating in the governance process, and developing a free clinic. These positions, together with his 35 years as a consulting physician, presented him with the opportunity to view physician behavior and its impact both on patients and upon health care in general. These observations crystallized his conclusion that the essence of successful health care springs from the physician-patient relationship. Dr. Hansen received his undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt University. He then attended the University of Southern California School of Medicine where he received his MD in 1965. His post graduate training in internal medicine occupied the next four years at the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. After a three year stint in the Army he returned to Wadsworth VA-UCLA for a fellowship in gastroenterology. Dr. Hansen is certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine, the American Board of Gastroenterology, a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, and a Clinical Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of California, Davis School of Medicine. He has been in private practice since 1973. He was appointed to the Mercy Healthcare Board of Trust in 1988, serving in that capacity for three years. He served as chief-of-staff for both American River Hospital and Mercy San Juan Hospital from 1990-1993 and was actively engaged in consolidating the medical. staffs of those two hospitals which merged in 1993. He was the chairman of the Physician Leadership Group for the 5-hospital Mercy Healthcare Sacramento system from 1995-1998 during a period of hospital redesign. Dr. Hansen was actively involved in teaching at UC Davis, School of Medicine for nearly 20 years as a voluntary clinical faculty person. In 1994 he helped develop a free clinic in Sacramento and became its medical director until moving to Maui in 2001. Dr. Hansen has been in the private practice of gastroenterology in Maui since 2001. Dr. Hansen's unique perspective as a practicing physician, physician leader, and medical educator provides the perspective and passion for his quest of the root cause and cure of the health care crisis. This book offers a solution for the health care crisis, which focuses on the need for a grass level approach and revolution led by the citizenry.

Empirical studies of life science research and biotechnologies in Asia show how assemblages of life articulate bioethics governance with global moralities and reveal why the global harmonization of bioethical standards is contrived.

New developments in science and technology have resulted in shifting ethical challenges in many areas including in genomics research. This book enables those who are involved in genomics research, whether as researcher, participant or policy maker, to understand the ethical issues currently developing in this field and to participate actively in these important debates. A clear account is given of how science and technology are outstripping the capacity of previous ethical regulations to cope with current issues, together with practical illustrations of possible ways forward. Key ethical ideas are presented, drawing on the history of research regulation and on an account of the particular challenges arising in the field of genomics. The book uses a grounded, practical approach to explaining ethical concepts and issues which is geared to enhancing interdisciplinary dialogue. Its broad approach to ethical issues includes relevant considerations from social psychology and there is a particular emphasis on understanding the problems of ethical regulations and practice in the institutional and social context of research. A glossary and numerous text boxes explaining relevant terms and key ideas help to make the work an invaluable resource for both beginners and experts in the field.

This is a collection of Ruth Macklin's previously published articles that appeared in scholarly journals or as chapters in books. Dr. Macklin's pioneering work in ethics and global health spans more than two decades. The articles in this volume range from a chapter in a book published in 1989 to a journal article currently in press. The essays fall into two broad categories: policy and practice, and multinational research. Topics in the first category include cultural beliefs and attitudes regarding family planning, long-acting contraception, abortion, and more broadly, policies and practices affecting women's health. Two essays dealing with justice focus on HIV/AIDS: how developing country governments might distribute medications fairly to all who are in need; and what obligations do industrialized countries and world leaders have to provide affordable medications to developing countries. A theme that runs throughout the essays is a defense of the universality of ethical principles, despite cultural differences that exist around the globe. The section on multinational research includes articles on international ethics guidance documents, such as the Declaration of Helsinki; discussion of the obligations of researchers and sponsors when they conduct research in developing countries; what constitutes exploitation when research is conducted in resource-poor countries; and, as in the first section of the book, the application of universal ethical principles to the global research enterprise. The author criticizes the view that double standards in research are acceptable: one standard for rich countries, and a lower standard for developing countries. Several essays deal with sensitive and controversial ethical aspects of research on reproductive health and HIV/AIDS.

Lisa Bellantoni argues that contemporary bioethics divides into two logically incommensurable positions: a cult of rights, which identifies the worth of human life with our autonomy, and a cult of life, which identifies human worth with the possession of a soul, and thereby, of human dignity.

Recent surveys demonstrate a high and possibly increasing prevalence of mental disorders in prisoners. They have an increased risk of suffering from a mental disorder that transcends countries and diagnoses. Ethical dilemmas in prison psychiatry arise from resource allocation and include issues of patient choice and autonomy in an inherently coercive environment. Ethical conflicts may arise from the dual role of forensic psychiatrists giving raise to tensions between patient care/protection of the public.This book describes models and ethical issues of psychiatric healthcare in prison in several countries. Relevant issues are: the professional medical role of a psychiatrist and/or psychotherapist working in prison, the involvement of psychiatrists in disciplinary or coercive measures; consent to treatment, the use of coercion in forcing a prisoner to undergo treatment, hunger strike, confidentiality. The book ends with consensus guidelines concerning good practice in Prison Psychiatry.