This book addresses new and evolving thorny issues in clinical ethics consultation. It is a book for our time. The contributors provide essential critical reflection on the standards and methods of training clinical ethics consultants as the field seeks to professionalize. This collection incorporates both North American and European experts, offering different perspectives on issues such as marginalized populations, the opioid epidemic, complex discharge, micro-managing families, and continually challenging issues at the end-of-life, such as determinations of brain death, physician-assisted death, and futility. The authors engage the complexities of choosing for others when making decisions for incapacitated adults and pediatric patients. This volume engages with the growing literature in these debates and offers new perspectives from both academics and practitioners. The readings are of particular interest to bioethicists, clinicians, ethics committees, and students in bioethics and beyond. These new essays advance discussions in the professionalization and certification of ethics consultants and offer crucial insights on new and evolving thorny issues in the practice of clinical ethics consultation.

Clinical ethicists encounter the most emotionally eviscerating medical cases possible. They struggle to facilitate resolutions founded on good reasoning embedded in compassionate care. This book fills the considerable gap between current texts and the continuing educational needs of those actually facing complex ethics consultations in hospital settings. 28 richly detailed cases explore the ethical reasoning, professional issues, and the emotional aspects of these impossibly difficult consultations. The cases are grouped together by theme to aid teaching, discussion and professional growth. The cases inform any reader who has a keen interest in the choices made in real-life medical dilemmas as well as the emotional cost to those who work to improve the situations. On a more advanced level, this book should be read by ethics committee members who participate in ethics consultations, individual ethics consultants, clinicians who seek education about complex clinical ethics cases, and bioethics students.

Definitive and comprehensive guidance for members of healthcare ethics committees confronted with ethically challenging situations.

Genetic screening technologies involving pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) raise particular issues about selective reproduction and the welfare of the child to be born. How does selection impact on the identity of the child who is born? Are children who are selected for a particular purpose harmed or treated as commodities? How far should the state interfere with parents’ reproductive choices? Currently, concerns about the welfare of the child in selective reproduction have focused on the individual interests of the child to be born. This book re-evaluates the welfare of the child through the controversial topic of saviour sibling selection. Drawing on relational feminist and communitarian ethics, Michelle Taylor-Sands argues that the welfare of the child to be born is inextricably linked with the welfare of his/her family. The author proposes a relational model for selective reproduction based on a broad conception of the welfare of the child that includes both individual and collective family interests. By comparing regulation in the UK and Australia, the book maps out how law and policy might support a relational model for saviour sibling selection. With an interdisciplinary focus, Saviour Siblings: A Relational Approach to the Welfare of the Child in Selective Reproduction will be of particular interest to academics and students of bioethics and law as well as practitioners and policymakers concerned with the ethics of selective reproduction.

A unique, integrative look at information-based medicine The convergence of medical science, biology, pharmacology, biomedical engineering, healthcare, and information technology is revolutionizing medical and scientific practice, and has broader social implications still being understood. The Engines of Hippocrates provides a unique, integrative, and holistic look at the new paradigm of information-based medicine, covering a broad range of topics for a wide readership. The authors take a comprehensive approach, examining the prehistory, history, and future of medicine and medical technology and its relation to information; how history led to such present-day discoveries as the structure of DNA, the human genome, and the discipline of bioinformatics; and what the future results of these discoveries may hold. Their far-ranging views are their own and not necessarily those of the IBM Corporation or other employers. The Engines of Hippocrates helps readers understand: Forces shaping the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries today, including personalized medicine, genomics, data mining, and bionanotechnology The relationship between pharmaceutical science today and other disciplines such as philosophy of health, history, economics, mathematics, and computer science The integrated role alternative and non-Western medicines could play in a new, information-based medicine Practical, ethical, organizational, technological, and social problems of information-based medicine, along with a novel data-centric computing model and a self-adaptive software engineering model, and corresponding information technology architectures, including perspectives on sharing remote data efficiently and securely for the common good An unmatched, cross-disciplinary perspective on the big picture of today and tomorrow's medicine, The Engines of Hippocrates provides a reference to interested readers both inside and outside the pharmaceutical and medical communities, as well as a peerless classroom supplement to students in a wide variety of disciplines.

Vols. for 1963- include as pt. 2 of the Jan. issue: Medical subject headings.

This book provides a careful and comprehensive, step-by-step method for providing clinical ethics consultation. This Guide can be applied in almost any healthcare setting and takes the reader from establishing an intake process and developing strategies for interviewing those involved in the situation, to undertaking a consultation meeting and following up on a clinical consult. The book is an invaluable resource to any clinical ethicist, or committee or consult team member who is seeking to provide their service with rigour and quality. Written in simple language, the book explores ideas and concepts that will help the reader to understand, think through, and ultimately offer useful ethical consultation when facing ethically challenging issues.