Medicine And Morality

"Medical professionals are expected to act in the interest of patients, the public, and the pursuit of medical knowledge. Their disinterested pursuit offers them credibility and authority. But what happens when doctors' supposed impartiality comes under fire? Medicine and Morality considers the ways in which moral and scientific norms in Canadian medicine have emerged and evolved over time. Critics of biomedicine tend to discuss conflict of interest as a contemporary phenomenon - namely in relation to the damaging influence of the pharmaceutical industry on medical practice and research. But Helen Kang examines three moments in the history of the medical profession in Canada, spanning more than 150 years, when doctors' moral and scientific authority was questioned. Kang shows that, in these moments of crisis, the profession was compelled to re-examine its priorities, strategize in order to regain credibility, and redefine what it means to be a good doctor. Medicine and Morality reveals that professional medicine defines integrity, objectivity, accountability, neutrality, and other ideals according to its social, political, historical, and economic struggles with the state, the media, and even the public. In other words, moral and scientific standards in medicine are determined in direct relation to, not in spite of, conflict of interest."--

In print for more than two decades, On Moral Medicine remains the definitive anthology for Christian theological reflection on medical ethics. This third edition updates and expands the earlier awardwinning volumes, providing classrooms and individuals alike with one of the finest available resources for ethics-engaged modern medicine.

Dealing with some of the thorniest problems in medicine, from euthanasia to the distribution of health care resources, this book introduces the reasoning we can use to approach medical ethics. Exploring how medical ethics supports health professionals' work, it also considers the impact of the media, pressure groups, and legal judgments.

Embodiment, Morality and Medicine deals with the relevance of `embodiment' to bioethics, considering both the historical development and contemporary perspectives on the mind--body relation. The emphasis of all authors is on the importance of the body in defining personal identity as well as on the role of social context in shaping experience of the body. Among the perspectives considered are Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, and African-American. Feminist concerns are important throughout.

Today’s medicine is spiritually deflated and morally adrift; this book explains why and offers an ethical framework to renew and guide practitioners in fulfilling their profession to heal. What is medicine and what is it for? What does it mean to be a good doctor? Answers to these questions are essential both to the practice of medicine and to understanding the moral norms that shape that practice. The Way of Medicine articulates and defends an account of medicine and medical ethics meant to challenge the reigning provider of services model, in which clinicians eschew any claim to know what is good for a patient and instead offer an array of “health care services” for the sake of the patient’s subjective well-being. Against this trend, Farr Curlin and Christopher Tollefsen call for practitioners to recover what they call the Way of Medicine, which offers physicians both a path out of the provider of services model and also the moral resources necessary to resist the various political, institutional, and cultural forces that constantly push practitioners and patients into thinking of their relationship in terms of economic exchange. Curlin and Tollefsen offer an accessible account of the ancient ethical tradition from which contemporary medicine and bioethics has departed. Their investigation, drawing on the scholarship of Leon Kass, Alasdair MacIntyre, and John Finnis, leads them to explore the nature of medicine as a practice, health as the end of medicine, the doctor-patient relationship, the rule of double effect in medical practice, and a number of clinical ethical issues from the beginning of life to its end. In the final chapter, the authors take up debates about conscience in medicine, arguing that rather than pretending to not know what is good for patients, physicians should contend conscientiously for the patient’s health and, in so doing, contend conscientiously for good medicine. The Way of Medicine is an intellectually serious yet accessible exploration of medical practice written for medical students, health care professionals, and students and scholars of bioethics and medical ethics.

In these essays, a diverse group of ethicists draw insights from both religious and feminist scholarship in order to propose creative new approaches to the ethics of medical care. While traditional ethics emphasizes rules, justice, and fairness, the contributors to this volume embrace an "ethics of care," which regards emotional engagement in the lives of others as basic to discerning what we ought to do on their behalf. The essays reflect on the three related themes: community, narrative, and emotion. They argue for the need to understand patients and caregivers alike as moral agents who are embedded in multiple communities, who seek to attain or promote healing partly through the medium of storytelling, and who do so by cultivating good emotional habits. A thought-provoking contribution to a field that has long been dominated by an ethics of principle, Medicine and the Ethics of Care will appeal to scholars and students who want to move beyond the constraints of that traditional approach.

In this unique study Fulford combines the disciplines of rigorous philosophy with an intimate knowledge of psychopathology to overturn traditional hegemonies. The patient replaces the doctor at the heart of medicine. Moral theory and the logic of evaluation replace epistemology as the focus of philosophical enquiry. Ever controversial, mental illness is at the interface of philosophy and medicine. Mad or bad? Dissident or diseased? Dr Fulford shows that it is possible to achieve new insights into these traditional dilemmas, insights at once practically relevant and philosophically significant.

​The goal of this open access book is to develop an approach to clinical health care ethics that is more accessible to, and usable by, health professionals than the now-dominant approaches that focus, for example, on the application of ethical principles. The book elaborates the view that health professionals have the emotional and intellectual resources to discuss and address ethical issues in clinical health care without needing to rely on the expertise of bioethicists. The early chapters review the history of bioethics and explain how academics from outside health care came to dominate the field of health care ethics, both in professional schools and in clinical health care. The middle chapters elaborate a series of concepts, drawn from philosophy and the social sciences, that set the stage for developing a framework that builds upon the individual moral experience of health professionals, that explains the discontinuities between the demands of bioethics and the experience and perceptions of health professionals, and that enables the articulation of a full theory of clinical ethics with clinicians themselves as the foundation. Against that background, the first of three chapters on professional education presents a general framework for teaching clinical ethics; the second discusses how to integrate ethics into formal health care curricula; and the third addresses the opportunities for teaching available in clinical settings. The final chapter, "Empowering Clinicians", brings together the various dimensions of the argument and anticipates potential questions about the framework developed in earlier chapters.