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January 01, 2014
Obtaining valid consent is regarded as essential before there can be an ethically or legally appropriate medical intervention. The justification is, simply, that patient autonomy should be respected. The patient's body is hers, and she has a right to do with it what she chooses. In order fo...
October 01, 2013
The divide between medical innovation and routine clinical practice is a grey zone. Clinicians are often torn between their dual roles as healers and investigators, between the need to cure and the desire to improve existing practice. While medical research involves "experimentation" on human sub...
April 01, 2013
There is little evidence on the quality of care patients receive in clinics in resource-poor settings. This study reports on the quality of primary care services in the public and private sectors in India, using about 926 clinical interventions between 305 medical care providers and 22 unannounce...
April 01, 2012
For most doctors (though perhaps not for the readers of this journal), the field of medical ethics remains an abstract subject which is of interest only to academics. However, ethics is applied to the resolution of conflicts in real life. This interesting paper uses the timeless principles of med...
January 01, 2012
The ineluctable allure and wisdom of Sir William Osler, which now spans three centuries, is elegantly put to the test by Mark Millard in determining its applicability to the medical ethics of the 21st century. While there is little doubt that our current technical knowledge and capabilities will ...
October 01, 2011
Cluster randomised trials (CRTs) are controlled trials in which the randomisation is applied to groups of individuals (clusters) as opposed to individual research participants. CRTs are increasingly being used in a wide variety of research with public health implications (including education)....
July 01, 2011
A chance to train in a low resource setting is a priceless experience for someone who aspires to pursue a career in international health. In recent years the number of US-based medical students undertaking short-term research in lowresource settings has gone up. The paper by Provenzano and others...
April 01, 2011
The concept of ethics in clinical practice is based on a need for treatment from the patient’s perspective. Most physicians have not been trained in the concepts and language of ethics, while most ethicists have minimal training in medicine. This limits the ability of both to tackle clinical ethi...
January 01, 2011
Financial arrangements between healthcare providers, or their professional organisations, and industry have long been a matter for ethical concern. Howard Brody, a member of the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) himself, has argued strongly against the controversial financial arrangeme...
October 01, 2010
Hospital ethics committees (HECs) have come into vogue over the past quarter of a century, but subsequent to Joint Commission International Accreditation's mandate in 1992, they have become an essential part of all major hospitals in North America. These committees work on different models ...