How to Analyze Ethical Medical Dilemmas

Medicine is not merely the scientifically based treatment and care of illness. It also involves ethical issues of right and wrong. In some cases, tough ethical dilemmas force doctors and other health care providers to make difficult decisions, all while upholding the Hippocratic oath to which all doctors are bound. In today's health care world, where the number of health care options can be great, medical ethics is of particular concern.

Instructions

• 1

  Determine the parties involved. Is the dilemma between a patient's desire and a doctor's professional opinion? Does the dilemma involve a disagreement between a patient and the patient's caregivers (such as parents of younger children?) Figuring out which parties have something at stake will help make sense of the dilemma.

• 2

  Consider underlying cultural, religious, and even political factors. Sometimes ethical dilemmas arise when there is a conflict between a patient's religious principles (or those of his family), or involving cultural gaps between Western medicine and other belief systems.

• 3

  Determine the dictates of the law and medical regulations. In many ethical dilemmas, the law, as well as professional regulations binding practiced medical personnel, prescribe a certain response to a given dilemma. In analyzing the dilemma, the weight of the law or professional rules must be considered as well.

• 4

  Determine whether the patient at the heart of the dilemma is "competent" enough to make a free choice on his behalf and whether that patient is privy to all relevant information. The key to analyzing an ethical dilemma is determining if a patient is of sound mind to reason logically about his treatment and whether all the relevant facts have been disclosed to him.

• 5

  Examine issues of confidentiality. Ethical dilemmas often involve confidentiality concerns that balance the privacy interests of patients (as well as doctors) against the health interests of others. Consider one real-life ethical dilemma reported by New York magazine, wherein a physician was faced with the dilemma of whether or not to report a seizure-prone anesthesiologist he treated.

• 6

  Develop theoretical courses of action to take and formulate a resolution based on the totality of facts and interests at hand.