All professions have their own ethical standards. Medical ethics is a system of moral principles that apply to the practice of clinical medicine and scientific research.
Among the principles that govern ethics in medicine we find those of honesty, care, integrity, non-discrimination and confidentiality. Thanks to medical ethics, the patient is assur that his or her personal information will be kept private, or that his or her wishes for care while incapacitat will be respect.
Ethics are so valu in medicine that all doctors agree to adhere to the Hippocratic Oath. This oath, made by the Greek physician Hippocrates about 2,500 years ago, describes the principles of medical ethics; many of which are still valid today. Currently all ethical foundations are includ in the international code of medical ethics.
How ethical principles have evolved in medical practice
To see the advance of ethics in medical practice, there is nothing better than seeing how some common medical practices decades ago would seem aberrant to us today. A good example of this call lists is lobotomy, an operation in which doctors break connections in patients’ brains to treat conditions such as depression and schizophrenia. At the height of the practice of lobotomy in the 1940s, before advances in mental health care, this procedure was little questioned within the medical community and even garnered a Nobel Prize in 1949.
Another example. In the 1950s, Virginia farmer Henrietta Lacks was facing cancer. Little did she know that one of her tissue samples would be us for decades in scientific research.
However medical ethics change as society
polio vaccine development, space travel, gene mapping and much more. No one asked her permission and her family didn’t find out for 25 years, and only then because a researcher contacted them asking for samples of her DNA.
That was wrong? For the researchers of the time it may not have been, however today we consider that taking unauthorized samples from patients for research is not correct.
And today, animal experimentation finds more and more rejection in society.
What medical practices that are normal today will Book Your List be frown upon in 100 years? Perhaps human clinical trials seem like an unnecessary risk when computer simulations offer better results. We’ll have to wait 100 years to find out.
