Medical Ethics: Ageless Issues that Will Not Go Away
Abstract
Associate Professor of Psychiatry University of Michigan Medical ethics is the application of broad philosophical principles to specific clinical decisions. It is the interface between questions that have faced physicians throughout history with dilemmas that are as current as the latest scientific data. Medicine has always hovered near the limits of human experience, giving a unique perspective and weight to the moral choices physicians encounter daily. The human mysteries of life, death, suffering, and healing, touch most individuals only a handful of times, but touch physicians in every patient interaction. Psychiatrists may spend less time with death and dying but have no less experience with human suffering. The exploration of that experience, with the revelation and exposure it may entail, creates relationships of depth and trust, as well as vulnerability. This issue of Focus is devoted to these ethical dilemmas, explored through new additions to the literature and review of influential writings of the last few years. The selection is not intended to be comprehensive but to highlight a handful of particularly pertinent issues, many of which are still evolving in professional and popular thought and all of which require our attention. Physicians have forever been faced with