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Often ethical concerns are limited to issues like informed consent, confidentiality patients rights etc. However ethical concern includes all areas of doctor-patient relationship? This paper will highlight ethical issues m everyday clinical practice. Clear-cut guidelines are not available in these areas but the purpose is to sensitise the profession of the need to carefully scrutinise very acti...

The Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare has implemented a policy of paying physicians to explain the nature of the patient's medical condition and the treatment plan. We describe the precepts of this policy and examine ethical dimensions of this development. We question whether this policy will be sufficient to ensure patients will have the opportunity to become informed participants in med...

The requirement of always obtaining participants’ informed consent in research with human subjects cannot always be met, for a variety of reasons. This paper describes and categorises research situations where informed consent is unobtainable. Some of these kinds of situations, common in biomedicine and psychology, have been previously discussed, whereas others, for example, those more prevalen...

New scientific discoveries and new technologies soon challenge our old ways of proceeding and thinking. It is no surprise then that new knowledge in molecular genetics and the ensuing developments in genetic technology bring with them new modes of thought, not just in science and medicine, but also in ethics, law and public policy. One tradition that is being challenged at the moment is the not...

The inclusion of children in research gives rise to a difficult ethical question: What justifies children's research participation and exposure to research risks when they cannot provide informed consent? This question arises out of the tension between the moral requirement to obtain a subject's informed consent for research participation, on the one hand, and the limited capacity of most child...

2.1. The Professional Role of Epidemiologists 2.2. Minimizing Risks and Protecting the Welfare of Research Participants 2.3. Providing Benefits 2.4. Ensuring an Equitable Distribution of Risks and Benefits 2.5. Protecting Confidentiality and Privacy 2.6. Obtaining the Informed Consent of Participants 2.6.1. Elements of informed consent 2.6.2. Avoidance of manipulation or coercion 2.6.3. Conditi...

In the summer of 1963, the nation watched in sadness as Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, the youngest child of President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, was born prematurely and then died of lung disease 2 days later at Children’s Hospital in Boston. Even now, it is common knowledge that children born prematurely are at high risk for death. So it is easy to imagine the stress...

BACKGROUND Pre-operative informed consent is an important aspect of surgery, yet there has been no formal training regarding it in Pakistan. This study was done to assess the preoperative informed consent practice. METHODS After taking informed permission, a questionnaire was filled in during an interview with 350 patients, who have undergone elective surgical procedures under routine practic...