Editorial: Clinical ethics
- Darryl Macer
Institute of Biological Sciences,
University of Tsukuba,
Tsukuba Science City,
Ibaraki 305-8572, Japan
Email: Macer@biol.tsukuba.ac.jp
Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics 11 (2001), 65.
This issue contains several papers on medical ethics issues involving human life and death. The comments of physicians on ethics of PVS presents some picture of what happens in clinical practice in Japan.
Then we see two papers from Turkey, which look at further clinical issues. The first of these is on truth telling, and I would like to point readers to the paper from India that appeared in EJAIB last year. There is more to this paper than strikes the eye. It was submitted two years ago and comments were sent back to the author. These comments arrived at the desk of Nermin just before the catastrophic earthquake in Turkey. A year later the comments were rediscovered as life was returning to "normal" there, and the process could continue. In the meantime some real bioethics was done by the
The case report looks at how a cultural norm of presumed virginity before marriage can be interpreted to give rise to what may be considered an unethical practice, of not informing a woman of the birth of her child and not bringing the child in contact with their mother to give the child a chance to be accepted. The paper that follows is on maternal education from Bangladesh, and raises the important point of educating and supporting mother's to look after their children if they are to have a bright future.
The paper by Dhar and Macer looks at the knowledge of bioethics and a few selected questions related to it, among first year students at a premier Indian medical school. It finds there is still much work needed to educate bioethics principles for medical staff in India. As Frank Leavitt raises in his comments, there are many other issues of bioethics in India and developing countries with the poor persons there. We need education of all in society on better bioethics decision making in order to build a more mature society.
The last paper looks at attitudes among young Japanese persons towards animals, extending some earlier work done on this question. The news section in this issue is not complete especially in the medical ethics sections at the end, however the complete references will be in the next issue. Also in the next issue will be the HUGO Statement on Somatic Gene Therapy Research, which is soon to be released following our latest HUGO Ethics Committee meeting at HGM2001.
- Darryl Macer
Go back to EJAIB 11 (3)May 2001
Go back to EJAIB
The Eubios Ethics Institute is on the world wide web of Internet:
http://eubios.info/index.html