Medical Ethics For Dummies

Introduction 1

Part I: Medical Ethics, or Doing the Right Thing 7

Chapter 1: What Are Medical Ethics? 9

Chapter 2: Morality in Medicine 19

Chapter 3: The Provider-Patient Relationship 33

Chapter 4: Outside the Examining Room: Running an Ethical Practice 55

Chapter 5: Learning from Mistakes: Disclosing Medical Errors 73

Part II: A Patient’s Right to Request, Receive, and Refuse Care 93

Chapter 6: The Ethical Challenges in Distributing Basic Healthcare 95

Chapter 7: When Spirituality and Cultural Beliefs Affect Care 113

Chapter 8: Parental Guidance and Responsibilities 127

Part III: Ethics at the Beginning and End of Life 147

Chapter 9: Two Lives, One Patient: Pregnancy Rights and Issues 149

Chapter 10: When Science Supersedes Sex: Reproductive Technology and Surrogacy 171

Chapter 11: Walking a Fine Line: Examining the Ethics of Abortion 195

Chapter 12: Determining Death: Not an Event, but a Process 219

Chapter 13: Death with Dignity: The Right to Appropriate End-of-Life Care 233

Part IV: Advancing Medical Knowledge with Ethical Clinical Research 257

Chapter 14: Toward Trials without Error: The Evolution of Ethics in Clinical Research 259

Chapter 15: Beyond Guinea Pigs: Anatomy of an Ethical Clinical Trial 275

Chapter 16: Research in Special Populations 293

Chapter 17: It’s All in the Genes: The Ethics of Stem Cell and Genetic Research 307

Part V: The Part of Tens 331                                                                 

Chapter 18: Ten Ethical Issues to Address with Your Patients 333

Chapter 19: Ten High-Profi le Medical Ethics Cases 341

Chapter 20: Almost Ten Ethical Issues for the Future 349

Index 353