Bioethics and Medical Ethics Commons^™

Inconceivable: An Analysis Of Assisted Reproductive Technology For The Church, Mary Elizabeth Gresham

Senior Honors Theses

Infertility pushes the boundaries of emotional and physical health, which is why many couples inside and outside the church turn to Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) for a solution. Despite what has seemed like silence from the Church, some individuals have braved the biological confusion and ethical dilemmas to evaluate the technology. Three major ethical viewpoints have emerged that each prioritize something over medical technology, namely community, order, or human dignity. This paper serves to educate pastors and church leaders on the ever-changing biology of ART as well as give voice to Christians that have spoken out on this issue. At …

Spiritual And Religious Interventions For Medically High-Risk Adults: A Systematic Review, Nathanael J. Strissel

Senior Honors Theses

This systematic review is an update and expansion to the population and methods of a previous systematic review concerning spiritual and religious interventions for the well-being of terminally ill adults. After expanding the criteria to incorporate a more diverse population and including non-randomized experimental studies that contained relatively few concerns of bias, the results of the review are inconclusive due to insufficient data. The lack of usable data in the field highlights the ethical and theoretical issues with the use of experimental trials in analyzing the efficacy of spiritual and religious interventions. The development of spirituality in healthcare will remain …

Controlled Donation After Circulatory Death: Benchmark Study, Marilyn R. Strait

MSN Capstone Projects

Abstract

In potential organ donors after circulatory death (P), does the utilization of an evidence-based critical pathway from identification of potential donor to organ donation (I) versus no utilization of an evidence-based critical pathway (C) increase the rate of organ procurement and the satisfaction of donor families with the donation process (O)? A benchmark study was conducted to answer this question, and in short, yes, it does. The utilization of a critical pathway, when individualized to a local population and hospital’s organization increases the organ procurement rate, the donor family satisfaction with the process, and increases staff satisfaction with the …

Euthanasia Of The Coronavirus - Covid-19, Sheila P. Davis

Journal of Health Ethics

At the time of this editorial, COVID-19, aka the Novel Coronavirus, has wrecked havoc and left in its path of destruction, death, unemployment, the instability of nation’s economies, misery, uncertainty, despair, and a fear regarding what the new tomorrow will look like. And, perhaps more importantly, the question of who will be here tomorrow lingers. Now classified as a pandemic, this virus has resulted in over 1,381,014 cases worldwide with 78,269 deaths to date. Presently, Louisiana and Detroit are emerging as the next hot spots behind New York as the fastest rate of increase for COVID-19 cases in the world. …

Children’S Autonomy And Medical Decision Making, Haley Thompson 20

Honor Scholar Theses

No abstract provided.

The Ends Of Medicine And The Experience Of Patients, D. Robert Macdougall

Publications and Research

The ends of medicine are sometimes construed simply as promotion of health, treatment and prevention of disease, and alleviation of pain. Practitioners might agree that this simple formulation captures much of what medical practice is about. But while the ends of medicine may seem simple or even obvious, the essays in this issue demonstrate the wide variety of philosophical questions and issues associated with the ends of medicine. They raise questions about how to characterize terms like “health” and “disease”; whether medicine’s goals should be extended to include enhancement beyond normal human function; and whether the ends of medicine are …

Case Studies In Medical Ethics In The 20th & 21st Centuries As Told Through The Perspective Of A Human Life, Madelynn Wildes

Senior Theses

This paper is an analysis of different case studies in medical ethics in the 20th and 21st century. The case studies are divided into three different categories of a human life: beginning of life, middle of life, and the end of life. Each of these chapters includes a little excerpt about a person named Jane as she goes through each stage of her life. This merely serves to humanize the topics covered a little more. The beginning of life covers topics such as abortion and eugenics and discusses court cases and ethical dilemmas surrounding them. The middle of life covers …

Knowledge And Attitude Of Nurses About Palliative Care, Asia Parveen, Khawar Sultana, Ali Waqas, Sidra Tasneem, Robina Jabeen, Ayesha Faiz Dr., Abu Ul Hassan Faiz Dr

Journal of Bioresource Management

Palliative care enhances the quality of life. To improve the quality of life, it is necessary for nurses to have good knowledge and attitude towards palliative care. It is imperative that nurses provide quality care to terminally ill and chronically sick patients. The present study was designed to assess the knowledge and attitude of medical staff nurses about palliative care in cancer. This cross-sectional, descriptive study was conducted in Mayo Hospital, Lahore and Jinnah Hospital, Lahore with sample size of 300 registered nurses by using the simple random sampling technique. Inclusion and exclusion criteria was used. Data was collected from …

Disease Mongering: How Sickness Sells, Vanessa C. Iroegbulem

Augustana Center for the Study of Ethics Essay Contest

“Disease mongering” is the practice of widening diagnostic boundaries of an illness and promoting their public awareness to expand the markets for treatment and to increase profits. This tactic typically used by pharmaceutical companies, medical equipment manufacturers, insurance companies, and even some doctors and patient groups, has become a great concern. Disease mongering has since increased in parallel with “medicalization,” which attempts to label normal human conditions as medical problems, thus becoming the subject of medical study, diagnosis, prevention, or treatment. This paper first seeks to examine how an increasing amount of life’s natural conditions and ailments are being seen …

Turning Passion Into Purpose: A Journey To Medicine Through Global Health, Laurenie Louissaint Md

Family Medicine

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Human Papillomavirus Educational Intervention Study On The Knowledge, Health Beliefs, Health Behaviors And Increasing The Use Of Gardasil In Women Of Color, Charlotte Hurst, Michael Hagensee, Syed Adeel Ahmed, Geornique M. Hayes

The Journal of the Research Association of Minority Professors

Lack of human papillomavirus (HPV) knowledge and cervical cancer awareness are factors contributing to a disproportion in African American (AA) women with cervical cancer. The purpose of this intervention study was to use gender specific and culturally appropriate HPV educational materials to increase HPV knowledge and cervical cancer awareness, to increase health beliefs, and the intent for AA women to use the HPV vaccine. Convenience sampling was used to describe a sample of 98 AA women recruited from an Ambulatory Women’s health clinic between 2015 and 2017. HPV educational videos and pamphlets materials were used to collect baseline and post …

Safety And Immunogenicity Of The Oral, Inactivated, Enterotoxigenic Escherichia Coli Vaccine Etvax In Bangladeshi Children And Infants: A Double-Blind, Randomised, Placebo-Controlled Phase 1/2 Trial, Firdausi Qadri, Marjahan Akhtar, Taufiqur R Bhuiyan, Mohiul I Chowdhury, Tasnuva Ahmed, Tanzeem A Rafique, Arifuzzaman Khan, Sadia I A Rahman, Farhana Khanam, Anna Lundgren, Gudrun Wiklund, Joanna Kaim, Madeleine Löfstrand, Nils Carlin, A Louis Bourgeois, Nicole Maier, Alan Fix, Thomas Wierzba, Richard I Walker, Ann-Mari Svennerholm

Faculty and Staff Publications

Background: Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli causes diarrhoea, leading to substantial mortality and morbidity in children, but no specific vaccine exists. This trial tested an oral, inactivated, enterotoxigenic E coli vaccine (ETVAX), which has been previously shown to be safe and highly immuongenic in Swedish and Bangladeshi adults. We tested the safety and immunogenicity of ETVAX, consisting of four E coli strains overexpressing the most prevalent colonisation factors (CFA/I, CS3, CS5, and CS6) and a toxoid (LCTBA) administered with or without a double-mutant heat-labile enterotoxin (dmLT) as an adjuvant, in Bangladeshi children.

Methods: We did a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, dose-escalation, age-descending, phase …

Surgeons’ Views On Shared Decision-Making, Suraj Kannan, Jayhyun Seo, Kevin R. Riggs, Gail Geller, Emily F. Boss, Zackary D. Berger

Journal of Patient-Centered Research and Reviews

Purpose: Shared decision-making (SDM) has a significant role in surgical encounters, where decisions are influenced by both clinician and patient preferences. Herein, we sought to explore surgeons’ practices and beliefs about SDM.

Methods: We performed a qualitative study consisting of semi-structured individual interviews with 18 surgeons from private practice and academic surgery practices in Baltimore, Maryland. We purposively sampled participants to maximize diversity of practice type (academic vs private), surgical specialty, gender, and experience level. Interview topics included benefits and challenges to patient involvement in decision-making, communicating uncertainty to patients, and use of decision aids. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. …

Prenatal Care For Undocumented Immigrants: Implications For Policy, Practice, And Ethics, Rachel Fabi

Population Health Research Brief Series

Nearly 250,000 babies are born each year to undocumented immigrant parents in the U.S. These babies are U.S. citizens, but undocumented immigrants are ineligible for most public insurance, making it difficult for them to access prenatal care. This research brief describes restrictive policies related to prenatal care for undocumented immigrants and discusses how these policies affect health care providers and the care they are able to offer pregnant immigrant women.

Building Bodies, Building Minds, Lis Regula

Learning Teaching Forum

Kennedy Union 211

Majors level Human Anatomy has long been taught as a gatekeeping class for medical schools of graduate schools, and has been highly professionalized due to this. It has also been constructed historically in a very hierarchical paradigm that has multiple oppressions supporting both the study of anatomy and the anatomy classroom. Besides these social issues around anatomy, there are the pedagogical issues of treating this material as something to just memorize and not understand that can cause problems for a student of anatomy. Disrupting these processes can be a very powerful force for anti-racism, anti-sexism, and hopefully …

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter, Winter 2020

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Ethics And Execution: Investigating The Death Penalty In Relation To Mental Health, Elizabeth Hall

Online Blog

No abstract provided.

Ada Constitution & Bylaws (2020), American Dental Association

Constitution & Bylaws

The ADA Commons Constitution & Bylaws archival collection comprises printed issues of the American Dental Association's Constitution and Bylaws. The collection also includes the ADA Charter and the ADA Code of Ethics issued 1924-1946.

The George Floyd Of Healthcare, Sheila P. Davis, Phd, Fnp-C, Faan, Lsm-Bc, Gary Davis, Md

Journal of Health Ethics

Authors explore the infamous murder of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, and juxtaposition it to systemic racial practices in healthcare as documented by the Institute of Medicine Report: Unequal Treatment. The current COVID-19 pandemic is presented as a situation which has the potential to ignite unresolved discriminatory healthcare practices. Proposed are policies which could possibly mitigate this phenomenon.

Tuskegee Syphilis Study Not America's Only Medical Scandal: Chester M. Southam, Md, Henrietta Lacks, And The Sloan-Kettering Research Scandal, Leonard F. Vernon

Journal of Health Ethics

The words “human medical experimentation” conjure up visions of Nazi medicine, which has come to exemplify the worst evils in the history of humankind. Places like Auschwitz and Dachau, where human life was cheap and test subjects plentiful were used as laboratories.

In 2010 the US government apologized to Guatemala for allowing U.S. doctors to infect Guatemalan prisoners and mental patients with syphilis 65 years earlier, while acknowledging dozens of similar experiments in the United States. These included studies that often involved making healthy people sick. such as in the Tuskegee syphilis study.

These experiments were often life threatening and …

Summer 2020 Ethical Issues, Dr. Sheila P. Davis

Journal of Health Ethics

Summer 2020 Ethical Issues in the Online Journal of Health Ethics

Patient Advocacy: A Tool For Resolving Ethical Issues For Patients That Use The Emergency Department For Chronic Care Management, Lawanda Baskin

Journal of Health Ethics

The current state of scientific knowledge on using the emergency department (ED) for chronic care management indicates that using the ED for chronic care management creates health disparities and burdens healthcare systems. Ethical concerns also arise because patients use the ED for chronic care management. This article discusses health literacy, self-care behaviors, and social support and the presence of patient suffering, nonmaleficence, and beneficence in patients who seek care for chronic care management in the ED. Patient advocacy as a tool to lessen these ethical issues is further discussed. Eighty-six participants were used in a cross-sectional correlational predictive study. Findings …

Ethical Guidelines For The Treatment Of Patients With Suspected Or Confirmed Novel Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19), Peter A. Depergola Ii

Journal of Health Ethics

This white paper provides basic ethical guidelines for treating patients with suspected or confirmed coronavirus disease (COVID-19). It responds to the need from healthcare organizations to address the moral considerations inherent to caring for this patient population, particularly in the context of scarce resource allocation, the imposition of limits to individual freedoms, and de facto social distancing. These guidelines are not narrowly prescriptive, but recognize the need of decision makers to transform this guidance into specific decisions. Ethical decision making assumes that such judgments will be based on current scientific knowledge, that effectiveness of interventions is carefully assessed, and that …

Presumed Consent And Priority Allocation Systems For Organ Donation Legislation In The United States: Making The Moral Case, Anna K. Shapiro, Peter A. Depergola Ii

Journal of Health Ethics

In recent decades, developed nations, such as the United States, have seen the gap between the demand and the supply of transplantable organs widen, despite national campaigns intended to promote donor registration. This organ shortage crisis has deprived thousands of a basic quality of life and has caused a substantial increase in the cost of alternative medical care such as dialysis. In an attempt to address the shortage, some countries have instituted explicit “opt-out” and “priority allocation” policies that operate under the principle of presumed consent and offer higher priority on transplantation lists to registered donors. This paper seeks to …

Allocation Of Resources And Health Professionals’ Burden During The Covid-19 Pandemic: Reflections On Advanced Directives, Informed Consent And Social Perception In Mexico, Karen Herrera-Ferrá, Leonardo Souza-García, Antonio Muñoz-Torres

Journal of Health Ethics

One of the main problems in the COVID-19 pandemic is the insufficient availability of resources. This deficiency has resulted in emotional and moral burdens of health professionals. Decisions are having to be made as to who will live and who will die. Moreover, given the global impact of this pandemic, negative impacts are heightened in low and middle-income countries such as Mexico.

Authors focus on two issues related to, but not exclusive, to the Mexican healthcare system in an attempt to partially address scarce resources and health professionals’ burden. First, is the empowerment of patients’ autonomy through the incorporation of …

Constitutionalizing Nature's Law: Dignity And The Regulation Of Biotechnology In Switzerland, James Toomey

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The Swiss Constitution was amended by referendum in 1992 to include two unique provisions: Article 119, which imposes strict limits on genetic and reproductive technologies in humans in order to protect ‘human dignity’, and Article 120, which commits the Swiss federal government to limiting genetic technologies in non-human species on the basis of the ‘dignity of the creature’. This article analyzes the role of ‘dignity’ as a limit on biotechnologies in the Swiss constitutional order. It concludes that the understanding of dignity the constitution embraces codifies a contestable metaphysical theory of value at the constitutional level. Specifically, the Swiss constitutional …

Kidney Donation And The Consent Of The Poor, Philip J. Cook, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Faculty Scholarship

In "Consentability," Nancy Kim tackles an important and current topic—in an age of increasing options about how to live, die, and procreate, what limits, if any, should the law place on those choices? "Consentability" is a valuable resource for scholars and policymakers alike, summarizing the arguments for and against government intrusion on the choices of consenting adults with encyclopedic thoroughness. After weighing the arguments, Kim proposes that “bodily integrity exchanges” be permitted, subject to limitations. Although we agree with the general conclusion that bodily integrity exchanges should be permitted, we disagree with the specific limitations that treat the decisions of …

Immunotherapy: Therapy Vs. Enhancement, Mariah Daly

Honors Program Theses

The battle against cancer is a long-standing struggle that has resulted in new information and the development of novel medical technologies. Current research aims to figure out a way to reprogram cells and bodily mechanisms to eliminate those cells that are cancerous without destroying healthy cells in the process. Methods which use the body’s own mechanisms, such as immunotherapy, have shown and continue to show potential for specifically targeting cancer cells. Adoptive T cell therapy is one form of immunotherapy that has gained significant attention and focus in the field. Therapies improve conditions up to the normal state of being, …

Ethics Of The Advance Euthanasia Directive: Death Within Dementia, Isabella Braga

Honors Program Theses

By the year 2050, over 131.5 million people worldwide will have dementia. While many dementia patients seek euthanasia as a means of maintaining dignity and autonomy, they are in a difficult position: because physician-assisted euthanasia is administered by a medical professional, in current medical practice, the dementia patient must be euthanized while she is of sound mind. She thus sacrifices years of fulfilled, compos mentis living. With an advance euthanasia directive, the patient can designate a brightline of dementia past which she would like to be euthanized. She would be able to live out her compos mentis years, and have …

On The Proposed Legalization Of Commercial Surrogacy: I Thought We Had Abolished The Sale Of Human Beings, Phyllis Chesler

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.