Health Care Ethics Consortium of Georgia ...ethics in action

Should women be able to make decisions regarding birth control pills without a prescription?

The Federal Advisory Committee on Blood Safety and Availability's 9-6 vote against lifting the ban on gays to donate blood is short-sighted.

The University of Michigan Medical School has become the first to decide that it will no longer take any money from drug and device makers to pay for coursework doctors need to renew their medical licenses.

Yes, at fertilization, gametes cease to be and a new organism takes their place.

Under proposed changes to federal research ethics standards, the Environmental Protection Agency will no longer accept studies that use people as guinea pigs in chemical tests.

There are “large gaps” in data now being gathered on the health of the 34,000 workers cleaning up the largest oil spill in U.S. history, and growing concern that BP Plc will fail to publicize problems if they do arise.

Medical ethicists have worried for years about the growing share of new drugs whose human trials took place in foreign countries where federal auditors could not make sure patients were protected.

Many doctors do not have a problem with taking gifts or participating in corporate marketing, a new study shows.

Fast decisions on life-and-death cases are the bread and butter of hospital emergency rooms. Nowhere do doctors face greater pressures to overtest and overtreat.

New findings from Johns Hopkins suggest that most quality improvement initiatives in U.S. hospitals are reviewed internally before they are conducted but that there is not routine consideration of the ethical issues associated with them.

How putting in a pacemaker wrecked a family’s life.

A new report concludes informed consent forms are often too long and complicated -- full of legalese and technical gobbledygook -- for many people to understand.

In a New Jersey appellate court, judges are being asked to determine whether physicians should be compelled to artificially sustain a dying person's life.

Right about now, it would be great if we could release into the Gulf of Mexico a vat of bugs that did nothing but eat gobs of oil and digest it into harmless smaller bits.

New York state medical centers and drug makers are launching an initiative to address a nettlesome problem for clinical drug trials: getting patients to sign up.

When Marisa Langford found out she was pregnant again, she called Dr. Maria New, a total stranger, before calling her own mother.

Medical school rankings are part of our culture, but the criteria used to determine the “best” schools may not be serving the needs of patients.

Ten years after the reading of the human genome, humanity is about to confront its true nature

The vital signs are improving for President Barack Obama's health care plan.

The discovery of links between rare gene mutations and autoimmune disease could help solve one of modern medicine’s major dilemmas.