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

Patients in some areas spend nearly double without lowering other medical costs, researchers find.

In 2006, the FDA approved a new vaccine against shingles. Since the vaccine has become available, fewer than 10% of all eligible patients have received it. Despite the best intentions of patients and doctors, the shingles vaccination has failed to take hold.

There is a strong public interest in having access to personal genetic information.

In order to ensure that bereaved families honor donor’s wishes, government should issue tax credits for organ donations, says ethicist and visiting fellow at the Université de Montréal in Québec.

Efforts to provide medical services by videoconference, a notion known as telemedicine, are expanding into all sorts of realms, but Iowa is the first state in the nation, experts say, to provide abortions via video link.

Is mandatory influenza vaccination for health care workers ethically permissible? Can a PA, or any other health care worker, ethically refuse to be vaccinated against a communicable disease, specifically influenza?


Amy Gutmann, a political scientist, philosopher and scholar of ethics and public policy and President of the University of Pennsylvania, and Obama's choice to lead the presidential commission on bioethics, answers questions prior to their first public meeting on July 8-9 in Washington.

The case of an abortion at a Catholic hospital in Phoenix prompted an angry bishop to rebuke the Sister of Mercy who allowed the surgery to save the mother's life.

Eventually Dr. Church wants to sequence the entire genomes of 100,000 people — nearly every one of the six billion As, Cs, Gs and Ts that occur in a human. “The goal of getting your genome done is not to tell you what you will die from,” he said, “but it’s how to learn how to take action to prevent disease."

The doctor-patient relationship is moving online. With 68% of American adults now using the Internet to search for healthcare information, it's no surprise that many also want digital access to their doctor.

A report says agency doctors helped refine the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and severe pain under the guise of medical research. The CIA says the report is 'wrong.'

An early look at Pennsylvania's experiment in delivering better and, in the long run, less-expensive health care underscores the challenges and potential benefits of one idea being explored as part of the health overhaul.

In February 2009, as part of legislation to revive the economy, Congress provided tens of billions of dollars to help doctors and hospitals buy equipment to computerize patients’ medical records.

Medical professionals who were involved in the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogations of terrorism suspects engaged in forms of human research and experimentation in violation of medical ethics and domestic and international law, according to a new report from a human rights organization.

With only 1 in 3 people sharing gene test results with their healthcare providers, do we really know what to do with direct-to-consumer gene tests?

Ex-officers in Zambia's air force were fired after discovering they were HIV-positive without informed consent prior to the HIV testing.

At least 11 states have passed laws this year regulating or restricting abortion, giving opponents of abortion what partisans on both sides of the issue say is an unusually high number of victories. In four additional states, bills have passed at least one house of the legislature.

In selling the health care overhaul to Congress, the Obama administration cited a once obscure research group at Dartmouth College to claim that it could not only cut billions in wasteful health care spending but make people healthier by doing so.

We finally have a case where the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy is responding forcefully and speedily to allegations of wrongdoing. But the target isn’t a pedophile priest. Rather, it’s a nun who helped save a woman’s life.

We finally have a case where the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy is responding forcefully and speedily to allegations of wrongdoing. But the target isn't a pedophile priest. Rather, it's a nun who helped save a woman's life.