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Bioethics in Brief
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Written by Mark Miller, C.Ss.R.
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A gentleman from Toronto was given some bad news by his doctor. “We think it might be a rare form of cancer. You need an MRI, but the next available opening is in six weeks.” The man phoned a clinic in Buffalo and had an MRI two days later, at his own expense.
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Bioethics in Brief
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Written by Mark Miller, C.Ss.R.
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I had been working as a clinical bioethicist at St. Paul’s Hospital in Saskatchewan for almost a year when I had lunch with a group of nurses from one of the units. We were discussing some of the difficult cases we had worked on together. One of the nurses looked at me and said, “You are not at all what we expected. When we heard that a priest was coming in as an ethicist here at St. Paul’s, we thought that they (the administration) were bringing in a moral policeman!”
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Bioethics in Brief
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Written by Mark Miller, C.Ss.R.
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The call came from a concerned group of caregivers at a long-term care facility with a unit for young people seriously injured in an accident or suffering with a serious disease. Lou, a young man who was a quadriplegic on the unit, had pneumonia and was being taken to the hospital. A staff member discovered that a friend of Lou’s had been sneaking in ice cream. Lou had no swallow reflex, so some ice cream had slipped into his lungs and caused the pneumonia.
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Bioethics in Brief
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Written by Mark Miller, C.Ss.R.
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Several years ago Daniel Callahan, then the head of The Hastings Center (a leading bioethics think tank), made a drastic proposal in his book Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society. He suggested that no high-tech, aggressive medical interventions be allowed for people older than 80 years.
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Bioethics in Brief
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Written by Mark Miller, C.Ss.R.
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I have been involved with a pre-pandemic planning group for two years. Health authorities around the world have spent considerable time preparing for a supposedly long-overdue influenza epidemic. The infamous 1918 Spanish flu that killed more people than the First World War presents a worst-case scenario, but two milder epidemics occurred in 1957 and 1968. The avian, or bird, flu in Southeast Asia several years ago sent a dire warning to governments and health authorities that a severe illness can surface quickly. Only the difficulty of transmitting this particular virus prevented an all-out epidemic.
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Bioethics in Brief
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Written by Mark Miller, C.Ss.R.
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Last month I addressed the challenges of offering medical treatments with little chance of success, coupled with Daniel Callahan’s proposal of refusing aggressive treatment to persons older than 80 years. Now I present an example, based on a current court case in Winnipeg, of another complicating factor.
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Bioethics in Brief
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Written by Mark Miller, C.Ss.R.
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The use of animals for experimental purposes is a mostly hidden aspect of medical research that is such a necessary part of finding new drugs and treatment options for various diseases and ailments. Laboratory rats, dogs, farm animals, and primates may be used to establish the safety and effectiveness of experimental drugs or treatments.
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