performed prior to certification and even then subject to a report of satisfactory performance from the trainer. Expertise in endoscopy is clearly something which requires considerable experience. While this document outlines the guidelines for credentialling, the ultimate responsibility for granting endoscopic privileges would rest with the individual institutions whether private or public who...

?2.25 45s Philosophical discussions of responsibility , freedom of the will and such subjects seem often to stand at an enormous distance from the more immediate problems of psychiatry and the law. That they should stand at some distance is inevitable and no bad thing, but to keep them too far apart for too long has, among other bad effects, the rather paradoxical one of making both parties con...

IN 1957, THE YEAR I entered college, the American Medical Association issued its "Principles of Medical Ethics." Section 10 stated, "The honored ideals of the medical profession imply that the responsibility of the physician extends not only to the individual, but also to society ... [with] the purpose of improving both the health and the well-being of the individual and the community." Improvi...

The concept of personal responsibility has been central to social, legal, and political approaches to obesity. It evokes language of blame, weakness, and vice and is a leading basis for inadequate government efforts, given the importance of environmental conditions in explaining high rates of obesity. These environmental conditions can override individual physical and psychological regulatory s...

We explore situations in which a decision-maker bears responsibility for somebody else's outcomes as well as for her own. We study such choices for gains and losses, and for different gain probabilities. For 50-50 lotteries over gains we find that being responsible for somebody else's payoffs increases risk aversion. In the loss domain, on the other hand, we find significantly different behavio...

In some situations in which undesirable collective effects occur, it is very hard, if not impossible, to hold any individual reasonably responsible. Such a situation may be referred to as the problem of many hands. In this paper we investigate how the problem of many hands can best be understood and why, and when, it exactly constitutes a problem. After analyzing climate change as an example, w...

Inherent in false confessions is a person taking responsibility for an act he or she did not commit. The risk of taking such responsibility may be elevated in juveniles. To study possible factors that influence individuals' likelihood for taking responsibility for something they did not do, participants in a laboratory experiment were led to believe they crashed a computer when in fact they had...

This study explores how dentists explain the concept of social responsibility and its relationship to issues affecting access to oral health care by vulnerable segments of the population. Analysis of open-ended interviews with thirty-four dentists, including dental educators, and administrators and officials of dental public health programs in Canada and the United States revealed that four mai...