Medical Ethics For Dummies

Jane Runzheimer, MD, is a family physician who has served on the Ethics Committee of Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. Linda Johnson Larsen has written 24 books, many of which have an emphasis on health, and has been a patient advocate for her husband and several family members.

• Introduction 1Part I: Medical Ethics, or Doing the Right Thing 7Chapter 1: What Are Medical Ethics? 9Chapter 2: Morality in Medicine 19Chapter 3: The Provider-Patient Relationship 33Chapter 4: Outside the Examining Room: Running an Ethical Practice 55Chapter 5: Learning from Mistakes: Disclosing Medical Errors 73Part II: A Patient’s Right to Request, Receive, and Refuse Care 93Chapter 6: The Ethical Challenges in Distributing Basic Healthcare 95Chapter 7: When Spirituality and Cultural Beliefs Affect Care 113Chapter 8: Parental Guidance and Responsibilities 127Part III: Ethics at the Beginning and End of Life 147Chapter 9: Two Lives, One Patient: Pregnancy Rights and Issues 149Chapter 10: When Science Supersedes Sex: Reproductive Technology and Surrogacy 171Chapter 11: Walking a Fine Line: Examining the Ethics of Abortion 195Chapter 12: Determining Death: Not an Event, but a Process 219Chapter 13: Death with Dignity: The Right to Appropriate End-of-Life Care 233Part IV: Advancing Medical Knowledge with Ethical Clinical Research 257Chapter 14: Toward Trials without Error: The Evolution of Ethics in Clinical Research 259Chapter 15: Beyond Guinea Pigs: Anatomy of an Ethical Clinical Trial 275Chapter 16: Research in Special Populations 293Chapter 17: It’s All in the Genes: The Ethics of Stem Cell and Genetic Research 307Part V: The Part of Tens 331                                                                  Chapter 18: Ten Ethical Issues to Address with Your Patients 333Chapter 19: Ten High-Profi le Medical Ethics Cases 341Chapter 20: Almost Ten Ethical Issues for the Future 349Index 353