W hen I taught my first course in bioethics to first-year students at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in the spring semester of 1981, bioethics was still in its formative years. There were scant few textbooks around and even fewer anthologies, and I could not assume that any of my students had ever read anything by a bioethicist or about bioethics. The key institutions ...

Bioethics is now taught in every Canadian medical school. Canada needs a cadre of teachers who can help clinicians learn bioethics. Our purpose is to encourage clinician teachers to accept this important responsibility and to provide practical advice about teaching bioethics to clinicians as an integral part of good clinical medicine. We use 5 questions to focus the discussion: Why should I tea...

March-April 2016 In the September-October 2001 issue of the Hastings Center Report, editor Gregory Kaebnick encouraged bioethicists to turn their attention toward “easily overlooked, relatively little-talked-about societal topics” such as race. He noted that that issue of the Report included essays on transracial adoption and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932-1972). In 2000 the president of the...

BACKGROUND Studying the contribution of individual countries to leading journals in a specific discipline can highlight which countries have the most impact on that discipline and whether a geographic bias exists. This article aims to examine the international distribution of publications in the field of bioethics. METHODS Retrospective quantitative study of nine peer reviewed journals in the...

BACKGROUND Medical ethics has existed since the time of Hippocrates. However, formal training in bioethics did not become established until a few decades ago. Bioethics has gained a strong foothold in health sciences in the developed world, especially in Europe and North America. The situation is quite different in many developing countries. In most African countries, bioethics - as established...

In this brief article we continue our reflection about the relations that should exist between the knowledge of biomedical sciences and the development of bioethics. After stating the principle of not absolute concordance between empirical and philosophical data as well as the former data are partial truths and highly contextualized by the experiment, we propose a certain criteria that should g...

Recent decades have seen a shift in the management and discussion of biomedicine. Issues once considered by doctors and scientists are now handled by a diverse array of participants, including philosophers, lawyers, theologians and lay representatives. This new approach, known as 'bioethics', has become the norm in regulatory committees and public debate. In this article, I argue that bioethics...

OBJECTIVE To analyse the time variation of topics in bioethical publications as a proxy of the relative importance. METHODS We searched the Medline database for bioethics publications using the words "ethics or bioethics", and for 360 specific topics publications, associating Medical Subject Heading topic descriptors to those words. We calculated the ratio of bioethics publications to the tot...

Last year marks the first year of implementation for both the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act in the United States. As a result, healthcare reform is moving in the direction of integrating care for physical and mental illness, nudging clinicians to consider medical and psychiatric comorbidity as the expectation rather than the exc...

This article examines the use of the notions of "Asian" and "East Asian" in definitions of bioethics. Using examples from East Asia, I argue that the verbal Asianization of bioethics is based on the notion of "Asia" as a family metaphor and serves as a platform of bioethical debate, networking, and political change. I maintain that the use of "Asia" and "East Asia" to shape bioethics is not so ...