Background Immunization should be considered a basic human right to health and well-being. It is everybody's business, and it is everybody's responsibility: the individual, the community, the health system and the state. This paper attempts to review some of the literature that highlights the ethical and religious concerns surrounding polio vaccination and what approaches may be used to counter...

Religion, ethics and culture are an important group of drivers for animal welfare policies in the Middle East. In many countries of the region the understanding of animal welfare is expressed more in terms of religious precepts and humane ethics than via regulations and legislation. In fact, regulatory and legislated animal welfare standards are still not well implemented and many animal welfar...

Jehovah's Witnesses' (JWs) refusal of blood transfusions has recently gained support in the medical community because of the growing popularity of "no-blood" treatment. Many physicians, particularly so-called "sympathetic doctors", are establishing a close relationship with this religious organization. On the other hand, it is little known that this blood doctrine is being strongly criticized b...

Every ethos implies a mythos in the sense that every systematic approach to ethics is inevitably based on some fundamental religious or religion-like story that gives answers to questions such as: Where did I come from? Where am I going? How am I to live? These narratives generally lay hidden beneath the plane of the interpersonal interactions that characterize all clinical encounters, but cari...

As a science and practice transcending metaphysical and ethical disagreements, 'secular' medicine should not exist. 'Secularity' should be understood in an Augustinian sense, not a secularist one: not as a space that is universally rational because it is religion-free, but as a forum for the negotiation of rival reasonings. Religion deserves a place here, because it is not simply or uniquely ir...

As religious sponsors increasingly relinquished their CEO positions throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, they established mission integration positions-staffed primarily by women religious-to help ensure the Catholic identity of their facilities. Now that role, too, is undergoing change as sponsors seek to empower the laity in their organizations with responsibility for carrying on the Church'...

psychiatrists any attempt to explore the nature of this relationship is regarded as an irrelevant luxury and religious belief may be ignored or even pathologised. These considerations may partly explain why most psychiatrists do not readily discuss their own religious belief even when it is a profound expression of their person ality or cultural background and may influence their approach to me...

Abortion, euthanasia, and the death penalty have sparked emotional public debates for the past three decades. Just as these controversies over life-termination have forced us to think systematically about ethics in the public domain, new technologies of lifeextension will provoke controversy in the twenty-first century. Known generally as regenerative medicine, the new health care seeks not onl...

BACKGROUND Patient autonomy has been promoted as the most important principle to guide difficult clinical decisions. To examine whether practising physicians indeed value patient autonomy above other considerations, physicians were asked to weight patient autonomy against three other criteria that often influence doctors' decisions. Associations between physicians' religious characteristics and...