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Home > Medical ethics

Ethical thinkers have suggested many methods to help evaluate the ethics of a situation. These methods provide principles that doctors should consider while decision making.

Six of the principles commonly included are:

• Beneficence - a practitioner should act in the best interest of the patient. (Salus aegroti suprema lex.)
• Non-maleficence - "first, do no harm" (primum non nocere), from the Hippocratic Oath.
• Autonomy - the patient has the right to refuse or choose their treatment. (Voluntas aegroti suprema lex.)
• Justice - concerns the distribution of scarce health resources, and the decision of who gets what treatment.
• Dignity - the patient (and the person treating the patient) have the right to dignity.
• Truthfulness and honesty - the patient should not be lied to, and deserves to know the whole truth about their illness and treatment.

Principles such as these do not give answers as to how to handle a particular situation, but guide doctors on what principles ought to apply to actual circumstances. The principles sometimes contradict each other leading to ethical dilemmas. For example, the principles of autonomy and beneficence clash when patients refuse life-saving blood transfusion.

To reconcile conflicting principles, Bernard Gert, a philosopher who specializes in medical ethics, propounds a theory that would require us to advocate our action publicly if we were to violate any basic moral principles (e.g., break a promise in order to save a life). Others philosphers, such as R. M. Hare and Michael E. Berumen, would require us to formulate a universal prescription in conformance with logic, such that all rational parties, including the patient (assuming he is rational), would subscribe to the same action in all circumstances that share the same essential properties.

In the United Kingdom, General Medical Council provides clear modern guidance in the form of its 'duties of a doctor' and 'Good Medical Practice' statements.

1 Death and dying

• EuthanasiaEuthanasia ( Greek, "good death") is the practice of killing a person or animal, in a painless or minimally painful way, for merciful reasons, usually to end their suffering. This article discusses euthanasia in humans; a separate article covers animal eu
• Final directives and ethics of resuscitation and the withdrawal of life supportLife support is a term for a set of therapies to preserve a patient's life when essential bodily systems are not working well enough to be relied upon. Life support therapies utilize some combination of several techniques: enteric feeding, intravenous dri

(See also Do Not ResuscitateA DNR or Do Not Resuscitate order is a written order from a doctor that resuscitation should not be attempted if a person suffers cardiac or respiratory arrest. This is sometimes known as a no-code order . Such an order may be instituted on the basis of a and cardiopulmonary resuscitationSurvival skills For other meanings of CPR, see CPR (disambiguation). This article details Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) procedure. It is intended as a reminder for those with previous CPR training. It is not intended as a "teach yourself CPR" guide.)

2 Reproductive medicine

• Accessibility of abortionAbortion in its most common usage, refers to the destruction of an embryo and its removal from the uterus. Medically, the term also refers to the early termination of a pregnancy by natural causes ("spontaneous abortion" or miscarriage, which ends one in
• CloningCloning is the process of creating an identical copy of an original. A clone in the biological sense, therefore, is a multi-cellular organism that is genetically identical to another living organism. Sometimes this can refer to "natural" clones made eithe
• EugenicsThe word eugenics (from the Greek , for "well-born") was coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, to refer to the study and use of selective breeding (of animals or humans) to improve a species over generations, specifically in re
• Genetic manipulation

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