Modern genetics poses some of the most significant ethical problems that science has ever faced. As a result of recent advances, scientists are now able to engineer living organisms with genes taken from unrelated species. Proponents of genetic...

From the beginning of the history of medicine, healers have had to deal with questions of ethics. However, the separate discipline of medical ethics has existed for less than 50 years, largely prompted by 20th-century advances in life-support...

In the United States, the largest of the three bodies at the beginning of the twenty-first century was Churches of Christ, with approximately 1.25 million members in 13,000 congregations. Extensive twentieth-century mission work, especially in AFRICA,...

A BABY GIRL is born in Boston, nearly dead as she enters the world. While still in her mother's womb, she has suffered severe asphyxia, or lack of oxygen. As a result, the baby—called Baby L. in press reports—is born severely underdeveloped....

Medical ethics is primarily a field of applied ethics, the study of moral values and judgments as they apply to medicine. As a scholarly discipline, medical ethics encompasses its practical application in clinical settings as well as work on its...

To celebrate National Health Care Week, I took my mother to the hospital. She was in at 9 a.m., out at 2 p.m. She went in with a cataract and came out with a patch. Total cost to Medicare: $3,000. This was not...

Are you the physician you dreamed of being? Ottawa - Ethical issues in medicine are not that different across practice specialties, and ultimately, physicians should be acting with the interests of their patients first and foremost, according to a professor in the department...

A ruling by Switzerland's highest court released Friday has opened up the possibility that people with serious mental illnesses could be helped by doctors to take their own lives.Switzerland already allows physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients under certain circumstances. The Federal Tribunal's decision puts...

State prison officials asked a court Tuesday to step into a debate about the death penalty, saying a threat by the state medical board to punish doctors who participate in executions has halted capital punishment.In a lawsuit, the state argued that executions aren't medical procedures,...

Physicians have always been confronted with life-and-death choices—having to make difficult decisions is part of the responsibility of being a doctor. But the predicaments that doctors find themselves in today are the subject of more interest and...

The questionable ethics of medical experimentation on humans, especially when the subjects have not given their consent.

A doctor's HIV-infected patient threatens him with legal action and the loss of his practice if the doctor tells the patient's wife about her husband's condition. Does the doctor tell the wife and possibly save her life, violating doctor-patient confidentiality in the process? Or does he remain silent, allowing him to continue to practice medicine while another human life falls in danger of contracting AIDS?

Essay provides a discussion regarding the code of ethics in the medical profession.