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Category: Discussions
October 01, 2001
Inequities in global health care, an increasing disease burden with decreasing availability of affordable remedies in the developing world, uneven public allocations for health, and the commercial demands of the pharmaceutical industry - all these have fed into an intense debate on the ethics of ...
October 01, 2001
Dr Asad Jamil Raja's essay on the amendments to the Helsinki Declaration raises many significant issues. While I agree with the essence of his comments, I differ on certain issues.
October 01, 2001
In countries like India the researcher's responsibilities to research participants may sometimes come into conflict with the search for affordable drugs and therapies for problems of the poor. An on-going trial in Mumbai illustrates this situation, and is being presented here for discussion.
July 01, 2001
The vegetative state was first defined by Jennet and Plum in 1972. It can occur as a result of trauma, hypoxia or degenerative diseases. It can be considered a result of improvements in resuscitation, retrieval and intensive care which sustain cardiovascular and respiratory functions but are not ...
July 01, 2001
Decisions on the withdrawal of care are not made in abstraction. They impact on the meaning and understanding of life — the life of the individual in question as well as life in a wider communitarian sense. The web of life into which we are bound makes arbitrary decisions on the withdrawal of car...
July 01, 2001
Ethics have always been an integral part of nursing on a daily basis. Exposure to frequent moral and ethical conflicts may affect the nurse, leading to burnout or resignation.
April 01, 2001
There are many who believe that transplantation represents one of the most spectacular achievements of modern medical science. Advances from many fields of medicine have contributed to a tremendous improvement in results over the decades. This has lead to a steep rise in the numbers of transplant...
April 01, 2001
As a libertarian, I believe that people own themselves. Any alternative would involve some form of slavery. And as owners of themselves, individuals have the right to sell their organs, give them away, and even to allow themselves to be 'harvested' of their organs in a productive form of suicide,...
April 01, 2001
When evidence of trade in organs for transplantation from live vendors reached attention in the West, widely different groups indignantly denounced it. Restricting my remarks to kidneys, I suggest that this indignation is misplaced. Those criticising the rich for greed appear to lose sight of the...
April 01, 2001
I am one of those who, according to Radcliffe-Richards et al, oppose the practice of buying kidneys from live vendors from a feeling of "outrage and disgust." These feelings are by no means irrational. They are based on a bedrock of moral principle: that no human being should exploit another.