Disorders of Consciousness Managing patients with disorders of consciousness presents challenging ethical issues for neurologists and neurosurgeons and raises vexing questions. How can physicians be certain that the patient is…
Brain Death “Brain death” is a colloquial term for human death determined by brain criteria. It is used when observable functions of the brain have ceased irreversibly even though other…
Medical Futility The concept of medical futility continues to provoke bioethical controversy although scholarly debate about it has diminished over the past decade. A requested therapy may be said to…
Physician-Assisted Suicide and Voluntary Active Euthanasia In the preceding chapter, I showed that over the past three decades, Western society has accepted the ethical and legal rights of terminally ill…
Refusal of Life-Sustaining Treatment A defining characteristic of Western medicine over the past three decades is the formalization of the right of patients to refuse unwanted medical therapy including life-sustaining…
Dying and Palliative Care The management of the dying patient is the focus of many ethical issues in medicine in general and neurology in particular. Ethical issues arise frequently in…
Resolving Ethical Dilemmas Clinical-ethical dilemmas can be defined as clinical problems in which all feasible solutions require breaking a moral rule. Whether to continue painful aggressive treatment of an incompetent,…
The Hospital Ethics Committee and the Ethics Consultant Hospital ethics committees have evolved over the past several decades to provide an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of ethical problems arising…
Clinical Ethics and the Law The ideal standards of medical conduct are dictated by medical ethics. A parallel and frequently overlapping standard of medical conduct is that regulated by the…
Professional Ethics and Professionalism Neurologists, like all physicians and all learned professionals, are bound by a set of ethical duties to those whom they serve professionally. Physicians’ ethical duties are…
