Opinion of Polish doctors on the use of futile therapy.

The discontinuation of futile therapy is increasingly discussed in Polish clinical practice. Given the need to ensure patient well-being, it is essential to consider whether all clinical options resulting from medical progress should be used for every patient and on what grounds decisions to limit therapy should be based. The aim of our study was to determine the opinions of Polish medical doctors on this topic.

Potential sources of conflict in intensive care units - a questionnaire study.

Background: Conflicts occur in intensive care units (ICUs), and an international multicentre study conducted in 2008, including 323 ICUs from 24 European countries, confirmed the occurrence of this phenomenon. There are no data in Poland. The aim of the study was to analyse the frequency of the occurrence of conflicts in ICUs in Polish hospitals, and their most frequent sources.

[Physicians' contribution in the creation and development of bioethics in Poland].

Bioethics was created in the 70s of the last century. From this period come works written by Van Resselaer Potter and André Hellegers, in which the authors raised the issue of the need to discuss the progress and to define a new reflection, they used for the first time in the scientific literature the term bioethics. In the United States of America, as well as in European countries, institutions began to emerge in which scientific bioethical reflection was realized.

[About the introduction the criteria of brain death in Poland in 1984].

Significant recovery of discussion about the need for the formulation of criteria of death was provoked due to the progress of medicine. Development of anaesthesiology and intensive therapy, introduction of new resuscitation techniques and devices, which are increasingly better able to maintain and sometimes even replace functions of the respiratory or cardiovascular system, which are essential for the survival meant that existing for centuries, socially accepted classical criteria of death, based on cessation of breath and circulation, are no longer sufficient. The criteria of brain death developed by the Ad Hoc Committee - 12-experts commission at Harvard University, published in Journal of American Medical Association in August 1968 and were the breaking point.

Beginnings of open-heart surgery in Gdansk - double role of the Pemco heart-lung machine and new facts about Dutch-Polish cooperation.

The first open-heart surgery in Gdansk took place in 1975. It was possible thanks to the gift of a Pemco extracorporeal circulation machine from the Netherlands to the Surgery Institute of the Medical Academy of Gdansk. The article presents additional, unpublished informations which enable a new interpretation of the previously known facts.

[About the genesis of the first Polish local research ethics committee].

From the moment in which the development of medicine became necessary experimental research involving human subjects, the question arose about the ethical limits and limitations of the experiment. The turning point was the year 1947. The Nuremberg Code was formulated after the disclosure of pseudo-medical experiments involving human subjects during the Second World War.

[How do first codes of medical ethics inspire contemporary physicians?].

First codes of medical ethics appeared between 18th and 19th century. Their formation was inspired by changes that happened in medicine, positive in general but with some negative setbacks. Those negative consequences revealed the need to codify all those ethical duties, which were formerly passed from generation to generation by the word of mouth and individual example by master physicians.

[A new approach of modern cardiopulmonary resuscitation in the middle of the 20th century].

The critical steps of modern cardiopulmonary resuscitation had arrived in the middle of our 20th century. Mouth-to-mouth ventilation was rediscovered and proven more effective than the manual methods and was combined with external chest compression into what we know today as cardiopulmonary resuscitation.