Medical Futility
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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…
Ethical Practice
Ethical Practice The rules resulting from moral theory must be translated into practical concepts to be directly applicable at the bedside and in the clinic. This chapter introduces the concepts…
Ethical Theory
Ethical Theory Neurologists routinely encounter ethical problems in everyday clinical practice. To resolve these clinical-ethical problems, usually they draw on their medical experience, clinical judgment, and moral intuitions rather than…
