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A Bioethics Critique Of The Healthcare System In Nigeria: Personal Dignity And Human Solidarity, Cyprian Duru May 2022

A Bioethics Critique Of The Healthcare System In Nigeria: Personal Dignity And Human Solidarity, Cyprian Duru

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Life is a sacred gift, an indivisible good with an inherent dignity and value. Despite its uniqueness, fragility, vulnerability, and limitations, it remains the most interesting, attractive, and exciting thing one can possess. These attributes invoke a deep sense of respect to life. Recently, science and biotechnology have astonished the world, as they continue to disorient human consciousness on new set of ethical issues. In effect, life is seriously exposed to the perspectives of modern science and technology. Thus, President George W. Bush warns that the powers of science are morally neutral, capable for good and bad purposes. In …


A Public Health Ethics Approach To Substance Use Disorder, Adele Flaherty Dec 2021

A Public Health Ethics Approach To Substance Use Disorder, Adele Flaherty

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The goal of the dissertation is to undertake an analysis of substance use disorders that focuses on a public health ethics perspective. The ethical argument focuses upon justifying the use of harm reduction and is primarily concerned with the current opioid crisis. While substance abuse/misuse over the course of history has been identified as a public health concern, this dissertation presents substance use disorders over the course of the lifespan, examining various contexts in which it can affect daily living and health outcomes. It achieves this by analyzing substance use disorders through the lens of the socioecological model of public …


Clash Of Titans: An Ethical Framework Towards Limitations In Religious Accommodation Within Healthcare, Yoelit Lipinsky May 2021

Clash Of Titans: An Ethical Framework Towards Limitations In Religious Accommodation Within Healthcare, Yoelit Lipinsky

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In late October 2017, a young Canadian Jewish man was at the center of a storm that involved ethics, religion, law and policy He had been unconscious for a month and doctors deemed him brain dead. The Jewish community, and his family, wished to keep him on life support, since their religion did not consider brain death to be ‘death.’ This clash between medical and religious perspectives poignantly illustrates the unique and growing challenges posed by religious observance in Canada’s secular healthcare system. A similar story is found in America. In December 2019, a story was published demonstrating fears that …


Examining The Intersectionality Of Religious Faith, Spirituality, And Healthcare Communication, Felix Okeke Dec 2020

Examining The Intersectionality Of Religious Faith, Spirituality, And Healthcare Communication, Felix Okeke

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is my own contribution in responding to the concern raised by certain communication scholars. Their concern was that little research and few publications have been done in the communication field by communication scholars that trace the relationship among religious faith, spirituality, and healthcare communication. While Parrott (2004) describes this apparent neglect as “collective amnesia,” others label it “religion blindness.” Thus, in trying to trace this relationship, this project uses Christian, biblical, and bioethics backgrounds to establish the value, sacredness, and dignity of human life, since these concepts make healthcare and healthcare communication necessary in the first place. These …


A Bioethical Paradigm For Enhanced, Post Or Transhumans In Medicine And Biological Research, Roderick Williams Aug 2020

A Bioethical Paradigm For Enhanced, Post Or Transhumans In Medicine And Biological Research, Roderick Williams

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation the question addressed is the ethical protocol that should be used when enhanced, post or transhumans present themselves as patients to hospitals, or as subjects for scientific research. With the advent of the birth of four children who were genetically engineered in China to be resistant to HIV, I contend that transhumans are already here, and the prevailing Western paradigm of principlism, while good, is not adequate to the task. I explore the basic religious argument that can be used against or in favor of what I call human-directed human evolution. I show how the fears of …


Public Health Policy: An Ethical Analysis Of Quarantine, Dina Alqahtani May 2019

Public Health Policy: An Ethical Analysis Of Quarantine, Dina Alqahtani

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As a public health measure quarantine has both historical and contemporary significance both in the United States and abroad. On the surface it represents a low-cost, low-tech way in which the spread of disease can be mitigated as its core requirement is that those who may have been exposed to an infectious agent are kept away from those who have not been exposed to that agent for enough time to determine whether or not infection has been spread. This has been utilized for centuries with both limited questions and scattered, inconsistent, or impossible to achieve oversight and goals. In understanding …


Behind The Mask Of Morality: (E)Urochristian Bioethics And The Colonial-Racial Discourse, Jennifer L. Mccurdy Jan 2019

Behind The Mask Of Morality: (E)Urochristian Bioethics And The Colonial-Racial Discourse, Jennifer L. Mccurdy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The discipline of bioethics is insufficient and ineffective in addressing the persistent issues of racism and racial inequalities in healthcare. A minority of bioethicists are indeed attentive to issues such as implicit bias, structural racism, power inequalities, and the social determinants of health. Yet, these efforts do not consider the colonial-racial discourse -- that racism is an instrument of eurochristian colonialism, and bioethics is a product of that same colonial worldview. Exposing mainstream bioethicists to the work of anti-colonial scholars and activists would provide bioethicists a framework through which they would be better equipped to address issues of race through: …


Emotions, Intuitions And Risk Perception In Critical Care, Oleksandr Dubov Jan 2017

Emotions, Intuitions And Risk Perception In Critical Care, Oleksandr Dubov

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The theory of decision-making as it applies to bioethics and healthcare assumes a rational decision maker: someone who knows all his alternatives, has clear preferences, can rank and weigh risks and benefits of an intervention, and always acts in his own best interests. However, the growing body of research from the field of decision science shows that, in reality, such a purely rational decision maker does not exist. Instead, patients are rational within personal or environmental constraints such as uncertainty or ambiguity in which non-rational approaches such as emotion and intuition are instrumental. This issue is particularly important in critical …


A Bioethics Tool For The Implementation Of Global Principles By The Pharmaceutical Industry, Daniel J. Hurst Jan 2017

A Bioethics Tool For The Implementation Of Global Principles By The Pharmaceutical Industry, Daniel J. Hurst

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Due to scandals of scientific misconduct, a climate of mistrust of science exists amongst the general public. This becomes of concern when we acknowledge that it is difficult for science and technology to flourish without broad societal trust. The pharmaceutical industry has often felt the brunt of such mistrust and has suffered many reputational setbacks over the past several years. Such reputational decline has a strong moral dimension, as it stems from issues such as the questionable conduct of clinical trials, pricing schemas, and access to medicines for low- or middle-income countries. The end product of such issues is the …


The Pedagogy Of Medical Humanities : Using Literature And The Visual Arts To Help Future Caregivers Maintain Their Compassion And Resilience., Lisa Higgins Shugoll Dec 2015

The Pedagogy Of Medical Humanities : Using Literature And The Visual Arts To Help Future Caregivers Maintain Their Compassion And Resilience., Lisa Higgins Shugoll

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation argues that medical humanities education for students considering careers in healthcare should begin at the general undergraduate level and should have two primary objectives, (1) providing tools that will help students foster therapeutic, compassionate relationships with their patients, and (2) providing strategies that will help students maintain healthy habits of mind that afford resilience against compassion fatigue. I assert that in order for students to practice compassion for themselves and others three core objectives must be met. (1) Students must be exposed to the fundamentals of bioethics in order to understand the virtue of compassion itself, (2) they …