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Advance Care Planning
The principle of autonomy dictates that patients have a right of self-determination over how they are treated. Advance care planning – and attendant documentation such as a durable power of attorney and/or a living will – enables individuals to decide and declare what medical treatment they want to receive if and when they become incompetent.
Biotechnologies and Genomics
Population health connects practice to policy, enabling change to happen locally.
End of Life Ethics
Cure sometimes, treat often, and comfort always. ~ Hippocrates
The four tenets of bioethics – autonomy, beneficence, no maleficence, and justice – play key roles in end of life ethics./p>
Ethical Theory and Principles
Population health connects practice to policy, enabling change to happen locally.
Informed Consent
Both in clinical research and healthcare, a fundamental principle is that of ensuring the informed consent (or refusal) of research subjects or patients. Doing so entails making sure that there is decisional capacity with comprehension, voluntariness without coercion, disclosure of risks and potential benefits, and awareness of options.
Patient/Physician Relationship
Healthcare professionals have resources for healing—knowledge, skills, tools, technology, medicine, etc—that patients lack and need. With resources comes power and the potential to use or abuse it. Lack of resources makes one vulnerable to those more powerful.
Pediatrics
Population health connects practice to policy, enabling change to happen locally.
Procreation and Reproduction
Ethics issues arise at the beginnings of life, the end of life, and at points in between. At life’s beginnings, questions are asked about the permissibility of assisted reproduction, prenatal genetic testing, abortion, eugenics, in-utero surgery, post-mortem sperm recovery, and a host of other matters of interest to bioethics.
Public Health Ethics
What obligations do we – as individuals, communities, and a society – have to protect and promote health and why? Public health ethics, a growing subfield of bioethics, helps guide decisions that affect health at the community or population levels using the best scientific evidence available.
Religion and Morality
The morals—values and rules—that guide our lives as individuals, families, and communities are deeply influenced by religion. One need not be religious or a participant in faith community in order to acknowledge how important religions have been to the development and maintenance of societal values and rules.
Research Ethics
Scientific research is valuable for the flourishing of human societies. When research involves living subjects, especially humans, there is some risk involved. Therefore, it is ethically necessary for researchers to minimize and disclose risks so as ensure voluntariness of human subjects and to reduce the likelihood of harms.
Resource Allocation
Resources necessary for optimal health and healthcare are oftentimes in short supply or otherwise distributed inequitably. How ought scarce resources be distributed so as to be equitable and avoid injustice?