Medical Ethics the Japanese Way

An American in Tokyo finds that the Japanese cultural values of consensus and deference to authority characterize their approach to ethical issues in health care.     

Medical Ethics and the Death Penalty

Moral opposition by medical professionals to participation in the process of sentencing for capital crimes, including refusals to provide medical treatment, may compromise the integrity of the legal process.     

Medical Ethics in the Soviet Union

An American medical ethicist finds the spirit of glasnost and perestroika permeating Soviet medical ethics. These themes, along with a heightened historical consciousness, and a commitment to the Hippocratic tradition, have reinforced a conviction about the infinite value of life     

Medical Technology Assessment and Ethics

The current model of technology assessment treats ethics itself as just another problem-solving technology. Ethics should resist this model to play a more critical role in technology assessment by better understanding the complex relationship between society, medicine, and technology—and by recasting how problems are defined.     

A Feminist Medical Ethics?

Book reviewed in this article: No Longer Patient: Feminist Ethics & Health Care. By Susan Sherwin Feminist Perspectives in Medical Ethics. Edited by Helen Bequaert Holmes and Laura M. Purdy     

Social Media,E‐Health,and Medical Ethics

Given the profound influence of social media and emerging evidence of its effects on human behavior and health, bioethicists have an important role to play in the development of professional standards of conduct for health professionals using social media and in the design of online systems themselves. In short, social media is a bioethics issue that has serious implications for medical practice, research, and public health. Here, we inventory several ethical issues across four areas at the intersection of social media and health: the impact of social networking sites on the doctor‐patient relationship, the development of e‐health platforms to deliver care, the use of online data and algorithms to inform health research, and the broader public health consequences of widespread social media use. In doing so, we review discussions of these topics and emphasize the need for bioethics to focus more deeply on the ways online technology platforms are designed and implemented. We argue that bioethicists should turn their attention to the ways in which consumer engagement, bias, and profit maximization shape online content and, consequently, human behavior and health. We also offer a set of recommendations and suggest future directions for addressing ethical challenges in these domains.     

Ethics and the Daily Language of Medical Discourse

The standard medical case report often reduces patients and caregivers to complexes of medical facts and clinical decisions. Restructuring the genre itself to acknowledge the human dimensions of both patients and physicians allows questions of human values to regain their stature as integral components of the discourse.