Archive for 'Medical Ethics' Category

Consent and Sensitive Physical Examinations Under Anesthesia

AUSTRALIAN medical students are performing intimate examinations on unconscious and anaesthetised patients without their consent. Unauthorised intimate procedures carried out by students included genital, rectal and breast exams. Almost half of patients were under the influence of medication or unconscious, while the remainder were conscious Study author Professor Charlotte Rees – former associate professor in [...]

Survey of Physician Ethical Opinion – Intimate Patient Relationships

A 2010 survey administered by Medscape tackles the ethics of intimate patient-physician relationships: [The] Medscape ethics survey …asked physicians of all specialties: Could you become involved in a romantic/sexual relationship with a patient? The survey ran from August to September 2010, and more than 10,000 physicians responded… the overwhelming majority, 83%, said that it was [...]

Duty of Care – Ethics of Neurology

our attention was drawn to a colleague whose subtle neck and facial movements were accompanied by grunting noises while eating—phenomena indicative of complex motor tics… When he had left, the medical student attached to our team asked the obvious question: with the evidence staring us in the face, why did no one inform him of [...]

How do Doctors Heal?

One of my friends lost a patient some time ago… It was the kind of case every anesthesiologist hopes never to have to face. Unfortunately, it’s also the kind of situation that comes to every anesthesiologist’s table sooner or later, regardless of his or her skill and experience. My anesthesiologist friend asked me a very [...]

How to Make Clinical Decisions and Avoid Defensive Medicine

I was asked to examine a patient who was scheduled for an emergency amputation of her leg because of gangrene. I went over her chart and discovered that one of the junior residents had seen her the night before and had requested two consults… I cancelled the consults because they were unnecessary. The next day, [...]

Cognitive Enhancement in Medical School

by Alison Hayward, M.D., Sarah M. Lawrence, and Bill Johnson, D.D.S. The first drug used to treat ADHD was methylphenidate (Ritalin), patented in the 1950s for depression, narcolepsy and fatigue. It then began to be used as a treatment for ‘minimal brain dysfunction,’ as ADHD was known at the time. Ritalin’s popularity exploded with the [...]