Medical Ethics Advisor – November 1, 2005
November 1, 2005
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Triage during a mass disaster: The usual rules don’t apply
A catastrophic disaster, either natural or manmade, that not only results in widespread casualties but also wipes out medical resources can force health care providers to abandon typical delivery of care and shift to a kind of battlefield medicine, where the sickest patients may not be treated so that care can be delivered to more. -
Medical ethics pioneer discusses advances
When Ron Cranford became a doctor in the 1960s, hospitals didnt have ethics committees. There were no ethics consultants, not even any case law addressing such issues as physician-assisted suicide. Persistent vegetative state hadnt been coined, and Terri Schiavo was just a toddler. -
Build ethical practice into clinical study design
Public trust in clinical trial research was damaged in the past year because of conflict-of-interest issues that arose with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and by front-page media reports about drugs that had been studied and approved yet were found later to result in deaths among some people who used them. -
Strengthen stem cell research ethics now
The possibility of using embryonic stem cells to treat disease, a strategy known as regenerative medicine, is not yet being explored in clinical trials, but current ethical practices need to be strengthened now in preparation for this possibility, according to an advisory committee at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF). -
FDA delays OTC status for ‘morning after’ pill
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) might have avoided one kind of controversy over the so-called morning-after contraceptive, but it created another by indefinitely delaying approval for the pill known as Plan B to be sold over the counter (OTC).