Tag: medical ethics

The medical profession needs to reflect on the crimes of Nazi doctors, says The Lancet

By Michael Cook Medical ethics education must be informed by a robust understanding of medicine’s role within the Nazi regime, according to a new report from The Lancet Commission on medicine, Nazism, and the Holocaust: historical evidence, implications for today, teaching for tomorrow. This is the first Lancet Commission focused on the history of medicine. Through examples of discriminatory …

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Healing, not Enhancing: Drawing Lines in Medical Ethics

By John Stonestreet with Roberto Rivera In the 1976 made-for-television movie, “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble,” a then-unknown John Travolta introduced Americans to a condition technically called “X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency.” Or, as people have called it since the movie, “bubble boy disease.” Children with “bubble boy disease” can’t fight off infections that the …

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Controversy surrounds Canadian Medical Association’s withdrawal from world body

What is the real reason CMA withdrew? By Michael Cook As we have already reported, the Canadian Medical Association resigned suddenly and dramatically from the World Medical Association at the WMA’s annual meeting in Reykjavik. The president of the CMA, Dr Gigi Osler, explained that the incoming president of the WMA, Dr Leonid Eidelman, had …

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After 70 years, lessons from the Nuremberg Code

By Michael Cook On August 20, 1947, an international tribunal which investigated the crimes of 23 Nazi doctors and bureaucrats involved in concentration camp medical experiments issued its verdict. As part of its judgment (seven of the men were sentenced to death) the tribunal also set a 10-point set of rules now known as the …

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A Human Rights Bioethics

By Dave Andrusko Editor’s note. This story appeared in the April 2001 edition of National Right to Life News, talking initially about the specifics of the upcoming annual NRLC conference. The story then segued into a discussion of bioethicist Wesley Smith’s then new book, “Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America,” where …

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The Difference Between Medical Ethics and Bioethics

By Wesley J. Smith Editor’s note. The following is excerpted from a column at Wesley’s wonderful blog. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ My wonderful friend Mark Pickup has rerun an essay on his blog Human Life Matters by Dr. Dianne Irving on the history of bioethics.  Irving was present at the birth of the field, dissents strongly from the …

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