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Books > Medicine > General issues > Medical ethics
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Intensive Care (Paperback, New edition)
Loot Price: R956
Discovery Miles 9 560
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Intensive Care (Paperback, New edition)
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Filled with critically ill patients, equipped with the
sophisticated and expensive technologies that are the miracles of
modern medicine, American intensive care units are testing grounds
for the most fundamental issues of contemporary medical ethics. The
doctors and nurses who staff ICUs daily confront these difficult
questions: Under what circumstances, if any, is it acceptable to
withhold treatment? Who should get the last bed when there are too
few? How should these decisions be made and by what criteria? In
riveting case studies collected between 1985 and 1989, Robert
Zussman describes how medical decisions in ICUs are considered and
reconsidered, made and remade, negotiated and renegotiated. He
concentrates on the practice of medical ethics, on the ways in
which right and wrong are interpreted and used in the ward--how
definitions of right and wrong emerge from the social situations of
patients, families, doctors, and nurses and from the workings of
hospitals and the courts. From this superb fieldwork--observing
medical staff on their rounds; interviewing staff, patients, and
families; and systematically reviewing hospital records--Zussman
reveals the existence of deep conflicts of opinion on how to
allocate treatment and resources. He shows that these perspectives
depart from the formal principles of medical ethics. He argues that
courts and hospital administrators, with their new insistence on
taking the rights of patients seriously, have reshaped the way life
and death decisions are made. At the same time, Zussman examines
doctors' frequent resistance to the precepts of medical ethics:
doctors, he shows, often override patients' wishes, justifying
their decisions in the name ofthe patients' best interests while
maintaining control over the decision-making process. In Zussman's
hands, the study of medical ethics becomes a means of examining the
logic and limits of professional discretion and a source of
insights into the social and economic forces empowering patients
and administrators at the expense of physicians. His book is a
strong, often moving portrait of the way careful planning is
undermined by the unpredictability of illness and the persistence
of self-interest, by high principle and curious compromise.
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