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Full-Text Articles in Medicine and Health Sciences
Complexities In Biomedical Decision-Making, George P. Smith Ii
Complexities In Biomedical Decision-Making, George P. Smith Ii
Scholarly Articles
Within the contemporary debate over medical ethics, without question the most striking weakness found is the lack of a basic yardstick against which either the "rightness" or "wrongness" of a physician's actions may be measured. No general agreement is to be found among physicians or ethicists acknowledging what ethical determinant the physician should or should not follow in a particular case. Yet, despite this conflict of uncertainties, a framework for principled decisionmaking does exist and can be found within the rubric of medical ethics.
Terminal Sedation As Palliative Care: Revalidating A Right To A Good Death, George P. Smith Ii
Terminal Sedation As Palliative Care: Revalidating A Right To A Good Death, George P. Smith Ii
Scholarly Articles
Not everyone finds a “salvific meaning” in suffering. Indeed, even those who do subscribe to this interpretation recognize the responsibility of each individual to show not only sensitivity and compassion but render assistance to those in distress. Pharmacologic hypnosis, morphine intoxication, and terminal sedation provide their own type of medical “salvation” to the terminally ill patient suffering unremitting pain. More and more states are enacting legislation that recognizes this need of the dying to receive relief through regulated administration of controlled substances. Wider legislative recognition of this need would go far toward allowing physicians, in the exercise of their reasonable …