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Category: Case Studies
May 07, 2022
This case study discusses a dispute between the healthcare team and the patient’s surrogate decision maker at a cancer centre. While the healthcare team deemed further care to be futile, the patient’s husband argued that they should continue to try to reverse his wife’s acute decline. This case s...
July 16, 2021
Ethical guidelines mandate that the researcher must obtain written informed consent either from the participant or from an impartial witness before commencing data collection. This case study describes some issues faced in trying to put this into practice. The research project in which these issu...
February 16, 2021
Poised to have the highest number of young people in the world, India will have the onus of providing adequate mental health resources to a demographic considered among the most vulnerable with regard to mental well-being. While the Mental Healthcare Act 2017 pushed for greater accountability an...
August 28, 2019
Environmental problems are more urgent and serious than ever: climate change, air pollution, water pollution, shortages of freshwater, deforestation, over-fishing, antibiotic resistance, and more. Discussions in public health address these problems because they affect people’s health and life pro...
July 09, 2019
A 25-year-old woman, six-months pregnant, came to me in great distress. She said she had been happily married for five years. Unexpectedly, a minor accidental injury to her husband had revealed that he had been suffering from a brain tumour since 2012. He had been operated on at the time but the ...
May 09, 2019
Rabies is a dreaded disease of zoonotic origin, responsible for an estimated 55,000 deaths annually, of which 20,000 deaths are in India. Some animal bite patients need rabies immunoglobulin (RIG) for post exposure prophylaxis, in addition to the vaccine against rabies. The major reason for the h...
April 30, 2019
This case study discusses the question of whether or not the information that a female foetus is a carrier of Duchene Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) should be conveyed to expecting parents. As only a female foetus can be a carrier of DMD, conveying the information of its carrier status would effectivel...
February 16, 2019
A communication in the January 2018 issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry detailed a clinical trial on persons with mental illness (PWMI), some of whom were in chains in a prayer camp setting in Ghana. The camp's advertised mission statement was to "set free those held captive by Satan" t...
November 11, 2016
Recently, a 23-year-old male patient underwent cosmetic limb lengthening, despite the fact that his height was that of the average Indian male (5 feet 7 inches). The patient's parents and the media criticised the orthopaedic surgeon who had performed the surgery for undertaking an unethical opera...
July 04, 2016
B was a frail 15-year-old girl who was brought to the hospital by the police. She had met a 22-year-old boy on a social networking site a few months earlier. They had fallen in love and she had started living with him. On finding his daughter missing, B's father reported the matter to the police ...