Once upon a time, medicine dismissed narrative as unimportant and uninteresting. Then, in the late 1980s, physicians and scholars became interested in how the study of narrative could enhance our understanding of illness and health care, and the field that came to be known as “narrative medicine” developed. Some of this scholarly activity focused on the idea of narrative ethics.After a flurry of activity around the turn of the twenty‐first century, narrative ethics seemed to stall. The general interest in narrative (...) in medicine continued but with few new ideas on how one might use narrative toward ethical ends. In the last few years, however, forward momentum has returned. The timing seems appropriate, therefore, for a “state of the field” report of sorts. (shrink)

In 1979, James S. and Jean M. Goodwin and Albert V. Vogel published the first of what became a series of articles that studied current patterns of placebo use. They surveyed 60 house officers and 37 nurses in a New Mexico teaching hospital. Only five of the 1900 patients hospitalized during the study period had received a placebo. Their subjects underestimated the pain relief provided by placebos and believed that a positive placebo response showed that the pain was psychogenic and (...) not “real.” The few patients who were prescribed placebos tended to be those whom the staff most disliked. A few other studies published during the 1980s showed similar results.Fast forward now to 2010.... (shrink)

I am grateful to Drs. Richard Bukata and Jerome Hoffman and the staff of Primary Care Medicals for retrieving and analyzing some of the references used in this paper.

Although the physician’s use and misuse of power have been discussed in the social sciences and in literature, they have never been explored in medical ethics until now. In this book, Dr. Howard Brody argues that the central task is not to reduce the physician’s power, as others have suggested, but to develop guidelines for its use, so that the doctor shares with the patient both information and the responsibility for deciding on appropriate treatment. Dr. Brody first (...) reviews literary works dealing with medical power, from Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor” to stories by William Carlos Williams, Vonda McIntyre, and Richard Selzer. These works, he shows, reveal the healers’ ambivalence over their own powers and patients’ fears of the abuse of power. Dr. Brody then points out important but neglected ethical issues that emerge from an analysis of power, such as the tension between care of individual patients and the pressures of the doctor’s workload; the rescue fantasy that impels some physicians to extraordinary lengths to save a life; and the economic system, which rewards surgeons and other specialists more than it does physicians who spend time talking with patients about their problems. He also shows how the perspective of shared power can shed new light on standard topics in medical ethics—from informed consent and confidentiality to resource allocation and cost containment. (shrink)

Among those who criticize the concept of a common refrain is that we really have no idea what futility means. For example, physicians seem to disagree on whether a treatment being futile means that it has a less than 5% chance of working or a 20% chance of working. If the concept is so unclear, then it seems a thin reed upon which to base a momentous ethical decision—namely, that the physician's judgment should be allowed to override the wishes of (...) the competent patient or the patient's duly appointed surrogate. (shrink)

Ulf Schmidt, writing on “Medical Ethics and Nazism” in the recently published Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics, states:In 1920, the lawyer Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche published their tract Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life. … Their positivistic theory was a combination of legal norms and medical arguments that granted the state fundamental rights while overriding the rights of individuals. The traditional moral belief system that advocated care and compassion for the weak and unproductive (...) was radically called into question. The book was written in the wake of World War I; readers were asked to compare the “battlefields littered with.. (shrink)

As the debate over how to manage or discourage physicians’ financial conflicts of interest with the drug and medical device industries has become more heated, critics have questioned or dismissed the concept of “conflict of interest” itself. A satisfactory definition relates conflict of interest to concerns about maintaining social trust and distinguishes between breaches of ethical duty and temptations to breach duty. Numerous objections to such a definition have been offered, none of which prevails on further analysis. Those concerned about (...) conflicts of interest have contributed to misunderstandings, however, by failing to demonstrate when social arrangements leading to temptations to breach duties are in themselves morally blameworthy. Clarifying “conflict of interest” is important if we are eventually going to develop productive modes of engagement between medicine and for-profit industry that avoid the serious ethical pitfalls now in evidence. (shrink)

Cost containment by means of prospective payment and other mechanisms is widely seen as a challenge to modern medicine; but the challenge is seldom articulated clearly in terms of core professional values and the moral content of a claim to professionalism. Medical ethics, as it has evolved as a field of study in the past twenty years, has contributed little to the concept of professionalism in medicine. For an investigation of professionalism in the face of cost containment to evolve fruitfully, (...) several things must occur. The true nature of today's challenge to medicine must be appreciated. The balance between tradition and response to social change in defining a professional value system must be appreciated. Physician income must be explicitly addressed as a moral issue. And practical strategies for investigating and affirming core professional values must be developed for health delivery systems and medical education settings. (shrink)

Froom and Froom all attention to referral bias as a frequent cause for misinterpreting the medical literature. This is particularly a source of false certainty, and therefore false science, in U.S. practice, where referral centers are often seen as the only legitimate source of medical knowledge and where primary care is discounted as a source of scientific observations. Appreciation of the primary care setting is therefore a critical element in theoretical understanding of medical epistemology.

This book explores the controversial relationship between physicians and the pharmaceutical industry, identifies the ethical tensions and controversies, and proposes numerous reforms both for medicine's own professional integrity and for effective public regulation of the industry.

A predominant ethical view holds that physician‐investigators should conduct their research with therapeutic intent. And since a physician offering a therapy wouldn't prescribe second‐rate treatments, the experimental intervention and the best proven therapy should appear equally effective. "Clinical equipoise" is necessary. But this perspective is flawed. The ethics of research and of therapy are fundamentally different, and clinical equipoise should be abandoned.

Some ethical issues facing contemporary medicine cannot be fully understood without addressing medicine's internal morality. Medicine as a profession is characterized by certain moral goals and morally acceptable means for achieving those goals. The list of appropriate goals and means allows some medical actions to be classified as clear violations of the internal morality, and others as borderline or controversial cases. Replies are available for common objections, including the superfluity of internal morality for ethical analysis, the argument that internal morality (...) is merely an apology for medicine's traditional power and authority, and the claim that there is no single, "core" internal morality. The value of addressing the internal morality of medicine may be illustrated by a detailed investigation of ethical issues posed by managed care. Managed care poses some fundamental challenges for medicine's internal morality, but also calls for thoughtful reflection and reconsideration of some traditionally held moral views on patient fidelity in particular. (shrink)

As the debate over how to manage or discourage physicians? financial conflicts of interest with the drug and medical device industries has become more heated, critics have questioned or dismissed the concept of ?conflict of interest? itself. A satisfactory definition relates conflict of interest to concerns about maintaining social trust and distinguishes between breaches of ethical duty and temptations to breach duty. Numerous objections to such a definition have been offered, none of which prevails on further analysis. Those concerned about (...) conflicts of interest have contributed to misunderstandings, however, by failing to demonstrate when social arrangements leading to temptations to breach duties are in themselves morally blameworthy. Clarifying ?conflict of interest? is important if we are eventually going to develop productive modes of engagement between medicine and for-profit industry that avoid the serious ethical pitfalls now in evidence. (shrink)

Chauncey D. Leake (1896–1978) occupies a unique place in the history of American bioethics. A pharmacologist, he was largely an autodidact in both history and philosophy, and believed that ethics should ideally be taught to medical students by those with philosophical training. After pioneering work on medical ethics during the 1920s, he helped to lay the groundwork for important centers for bioethics and medical humanities at two institutions where he worked, the University of California-San Francisco and the University of Texas (...) Medical Branch-Galveston. Understanding Leake’s role in American bioethics requires navigating a number of paradoxes—why he was described respectfully in his time but largely forgotten today; how in the 1920s he could write forward-looking pieces that anticipated many of the themes taken up by bioethics a half-century later, yet played largely a reactionary role when the new bioethics actually arrived; and why he advocated turning to philosophy and philosophers for a proper understanding of ethics, yet appeared often to misunderstand philosophical ethics. (shrink)

Most accounts of why physicians have a duty to treat patients during a pandemic look to the special ethical standards of the medical profession. An adequate account must be deeper and broader: it must set the professional duty alongside other individual commitments and broader social values.

: The "difference position" holds that clinical research and therapeutic medical practice are sufficiently distinct activities to require different ethical rules and principles. The "similarity position" holds instead that clinical investigators ought to be bound by the same fundamental principles that govern therapeutic medicine—specifically, a duty to provide the optimal therapeutic benefit to each patient or subject. Some defenders of the similarity position defend it because of the overlap between the role of attending physician and the role of investigator in (...) a research trial. This overlap is maximal when the same physician occupies both roles with respect to a particular patient-subject. We address the ethical tensions inherent in that role conflict and argue that the tensions are real but manageable. The difference position provides a sound ethical framework within which to manage those tensions, while the similarity position is unsatisfactory because it seeks to deny the existence of the tensions. (shrink)

Current legal standards of informed consent send the wrong message to physicians about their moral and legal expectations. A “transparency” model that sees consent as a conversation process can enhance good medical practice and patient autonomy without foreclosing appropriate judicial review.

Bioethics' interdisciplinary base -- Patient-centered care -- Evidence-based medicine and pay-for-performance -- Community dialogue -- Overview : bioethics, power, and learning to see -- Cross-cultural concerns -- Race and health disparities -- Disabilities -- Environmental and global issues -- New technologies -- Conclusion.

The practice of voluntary physician‐assisted death as a last resort is compatible with doctors' duties to practice competently, to avoid harming patients unduly, to refrain from medical fraud, and to preserve patients' trust. It therefore does not violate physicians' professional integrity.

Book reviewed in this article: The Healer's Power. By Howard Brody.

The leading ethical position on placebo-controlled clinical trials is that whenever proven effective treatment exists for a given condition, it is unethical to test a new treatment for that condition against placebo. Invoking the principle of clinical equipoise, opponents of placebo-controlled trials in the face of proven effective treatment argue that they (1) violate the therapeutic obligation of physicians to offer optimal medical care and (2) lack both scientific and clinical merit. We contend that both of these arguments are mistaken. (...) Clinical equipoise provides erroneous ethical guidance in the case of placebo-controlled trials, because it ignores the ethically relevant distinction between clinical trials and treatment in the context of clinical medicine and the methodological limitations of active-controlled trials. Placebo controls are ethically justifiable when they are supported by sound methodological considerations and their use does not expose research participants to excessive risks of harm. (shrink)

A special report of The Hastings Center and the Association of American Medical Colleges addressed the ethical oversight of learning health systems, which seek to combine high‐quality patient care with routine data collection aimed at improving patient outcomes. The report contained two position papers, authored by a number of distinguished bioethicists, and several commentaries. The position papers urged two changes. First, they urged a rethinking of our approach to the regulation of human subjects research, so as to make it easier (...) in the future for learning health systems to function well. Second, they argued that the rethinking required dispensing with a strict distinction between research and therapy, which has been a major tenet of bioethics since the Belmont Report, which explicated basic ethical principles governing human subjects research. We fully support the objectives of the authors, and we agree that the learning health system is an important advance that serves patients well. Unnecessary regulatory burden ought not impede this progress. We disagree, however, that the best way to bring about these needed changes in the regulatory environment is to reject the basic distinction between research and treatment. Unfortunately, we find the arguments in favor of that strategy to be, in places, reminiscent of what we take to be basic conceptual errors that hampered the ethical understanding of human subjects research prior to adoption of the Belmont Report. To see why one need not reject the research‐treatment distinction in order to promote learning health systems, we first investigate in some detail the arguments offered for eliminating the distinction. We next turn to an issue not addressed by those authors, namely, the relationship between the physician or investigator and the patient or subject, to illustrate why the distinction is important and what is lost if it is jettisoned. (shrink)

A commentary on “What's Not Being Shared in Shared Decision‐Making?” from the July‐August 2013.

In 1945–46, representatives of the U.S. government made similar discoveries in both Germany and Japan, unearthing evidence of unethical experiments on human beings that could be viewed as war crimes. The outcomes in the two defeated nations, however, were strikingly different. In Germany, the United States, influenced by the Canadian physician John Thompson, played a key role in bringing Nazi physicians to trial and publicizing their misdeeds. In Japan, the United States played an equally key role in concealing information about (...) the biological warfare experiments and in securing immunity from prosecution for the perpetrators. The greater force of appeals to national security and wartime exigency help to explain these different outcomes. (shrink)

Published in 1981, “The Maximin Strategy in Modern Obstetrics” offered two claims—first, that obstetrical interventions ought to be assessed not singly, but rather as packages of interconnected measures that could cumulatively increase risks of harm; and second, that many of these interventions, considered either singly or as a package, lacked a sound evidence base. The first claim has been well supported by later literature, although the term “cascade effect” has proven a more felicitous descriptor for the phenomenon of interventions that (...) trigger the use of other interventions to monitor, prevent, or treat possible side-effects. The second claim was initially supported in a very inadequate way, since the “Maximin” article appeared before an understanding of the methods of systematic reviews of medical evidence had been widely promulgated. Despite these defects, subsequent, rigorously conducted systematic reviews have tended to confirm the impression first offered in 1981, that practices that support physiologic childbearing and the innate, hormonally driven capacities of childbearing women and their fetuses/newborns are much more in keeping with the available evidence than practices involving common or routine high-technology interference with physiologic processes. Harm may occur either directly, through high-technology interventions, or when such procedures distract attention and resources from safe, effective biological processes and lower-technology measures. Surveys indicate a lack of knowledge of this evidence among childbearing women, signaling a serious ethical deficiency in shared decision-making processes and perhaps the skills and knowledge of maternity care clinicians. (shrink)

Computer technology as well as the need to conduct research in primary care settings, has stimulated the creation in the U.S. of information networks linking private physicians' offices and other primary care practice sights. These networks give rise to several problems which have philosophic interest. One is a numerator problem created by the difficulty in primary care of using the more complicated or invasive diagnostic technologies commonly employed in tertiary care research. Another is a denominator problem arising from the difficulties (...) in determining which and how many patients constitute the population from which a practice is drawn. Finally, this mode of research raises questions about the social construction of medical reality and how objective medical truth is actually based on carefully selected patient experience. All these questions combine to challenge the gold standard view on medical research: the idea that some sorts of medical knowledge are epistemologically privileged and can serve as a bench-mark to determine whether new data are valid. (shrink)

A basic question of medical ethics is whether the norms governing medical practice should be understood as the application of principles and rules of the common morality to medicine or whether some of these norms are internal or proper to medicine. In this article we describe and defend an evolutionary perspective on the internal morality of medicine that is defined in terms of the goals of clinical medicine and a set of duties that constrain medical practice in pursuit of these (...) goals. This perspective is developed by means of a critical examination of the essentialist conception of the internal morality of medicine advocated by Edmund Pellegrino and the critique of internal morality approaches by Robert Veatch and Tom Beauchamp. (shrink)

Knight has shown how the moral growth of medical students involves a spiritual journey. He may, however, present too sanguine a portrayal of the extent to which the medical education environment promotes this moral and spiritual growth. Medical school may indeed be more abusive than supportive. Admitting more women to medical school and teaching more humanities courses, while worthwhile, will not necessarily promote the goals that Knight appropriately advocates.

Cosmetic surgery is a fast-growing medical practice. In 1997 surgeons in the United States performed the four most common cosmetic procedures443,728 times, an increase of 150% over the comparable total for 1992. Estimated total expenditures for cosmetic surgery range from $1 to $2 billion. As managed care cuts into physicians' income and autonomy, cosmetic surgery, which is not covered by health insurance, offers a financially attractive medical specialty.

A recent statement from multiple critical care societies appropriately focuses on communication and negotiation as the major approach to the sorts of cases that have previously been labeled with the term futility. Unfortunately, the statement persists in addressing futility in a way that I have argued is unsatisfactory. Schneiderman, Jecker, and Jonsen now respond to the statement and make a number of helpful points. However, in a few ways, I also find their response off target. I will address the key (...) points of the discussion in a way that is consistent with a position I took some years ago and that I still believe to be appropriate. I... (shrink)

In 1964, anesthesiologists at Harvard Medical School studied a group of patients about to undergo major abdominal surgery. Half the patients got the standard preoperative visit. The other half received an enhanced visit dealing with postoperative pain. That half were told that pain is normal and expected, that they would receive medications as ordered by their physicians, that they could also use several self-help techniques to relieve pain, and that nurses and physicians would be standing by to assist them if (...) needed. The enhanced-visit group ended up requesting half as many opioid analgesics as the other group, and they were discharged an average of two days earlier, despite successful blinding (Egbert et al.... (shrink)

A less analytic and more wholistic approach to philosophy, described as best overall fit or seeing how things all hang together, is defended in recent works by John Rawls and Richard Rorty and can usefully be applied to problems in philosophy of medicine. Looking at sickness and its impact upon the person as a central problem for philosophy of medicine, this approach discourages a search for necessary and sufficient conditions for being sick, and instead encourages a listing of true and (...) interesting observations about sickness which reflect the convergence of a number of different viewpoints. Among the relevant viewpoints are other humanities disciplines besides philosophy and the social sciences. Literature, in particular, provides insights into the meaning and the uniqueness of episodes of sickness in a way that philosophers may otherwise fail to grasp. (shrink)

A review of the philosophical debate on theoretical models for the physician-patient relationship over the past fifteen years may point to some of the more productive questions for future research. Contractual models have been criticized for promoting a legalistic and minimalistic image of the relationship, such that another form of model (such as convenant) is required. Shifting from a contractual to a contractarian model (in keeping with Rawls' notion of an original position) provides an adequate response to many criticisms of (...) this type. A deeper criticism, however, is one that advocates a shift to a virtue-based approach. A creative amalgam between a contractarian model and elements of the virtue-based approach, combined with appropriate empirical investigation, may yield richer models in the future. (shrink)

Before asking what U.S. bioethics might learn from a more comprehensive and more nuanced understanding of Islamic religion, history, and culture, a prior question is, how should bioethics think about religion? Two sets of commonly held assumptions impede further progress and insight. The first involves what “religion” means and how one should study it. The second is a prominent philosophical view of the role of religion in a diverse, democratic society. To move beyond these assumptions, it helps to view religion (...) as lived experience as well as a body of doctrine and to see that religious differences and controversies should be welcomed in the public square of a diverse democratic society rather than merely tolerated. (shrink)