to understand the traditional description of medicine as a practice of healing, it is necessary to examine its relationships with both science and ethics. the “scientific” component of medicine includes an acknowledgment of the influence of social, cultural and environmental factors on the functioning of the organism. the “ethical” component is often presented as merely supplementary but actual...

While there is wide agreement on the importance of love to Christian ethics, just what an ethics of love includes and entails differs depending upon how Christian love is understood. Toward clarifying the relationship between love and Christian ethics, this essay briefly engages the highly influential agapist conception of love and questions its sufficiency as the basis of Christian ethics. Con...

Dr. Mitchell is chairperson, Department of Biomedical Ethics, School of Graduate Medical Education, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ. He is also director, Institute for Ethics, a division of the Catholic HealthCare Partnership of New Jersey. I n 1999 the Institute for Ethics, a division of the Catholic HealthCare Partnership of New Jersey, launched a program to assist institutional ethic...

BACKGROUND Internationally, clinical ethics support has yet to be implemented systematically in community health and care services. A large-scale Norwegian project (2007-2015) attempted to increase ethical competence in community services through facilitating the implementation of ethics support activities in 241 Norwegian municipalities. The article describes the ethics project and the ethics ...

BACKGROUND There is now strong evidence that preventive oral antiretroviral therapy can moderately reduce likelihood of HIV infection. This concept is called HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). Premature closures of some previous PrEP clinical trials, secondary to ethical concerns, did not stop research. We aimed to appraise the extent of ethics considerations reporting in PrEP study documents...

In a controversial paper, David Seedhouse argues that medical ethics is not and cannot be a distinct discipline with it own field of study. He derives this claim from a characterization of ethics, which he states but does not defend. He claims further that the project of medical ethics as it exists and of moral philosophy do not overlap. I show that Seedhouse's views on ethics have wide implica...

Ethics was a key theme at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons’ Scientific Congress in Perth this May. The topics ranged from the ethics of innovative surgery to the ethics of medicolegal work. In my speech to the delegates, I applauded the selection of the theme and gently criticised the situation “up north.” I referred to the lack of an ethics course on the vast menu of courses offered ...

OBJECTIVES To characterise UK undergraduate medical ethics curricula and to identify opportunities and threats to teaching and learning. DESIGN Postal questionnaire survey of UK medical schools enquiring about teaching and assessment, including future perspectives. PARTICIPANTS The lead for teaching and learning at each medical school was invited to complete a questionnaire. RESULTS Compl...

OBJECTIVE This study explores the literature in establishing the value of undergraduate peer-based healthcare ethics teaching as an educational methodology. METHODS A narrative review of the literature concerning peer-based ethics teaching was conducted. MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, SCOPUS databases, and the Cochrane Library, were systematically searched for studies of peer-based ethics or profes...