The World Medical Association has announced that a new revision process of the Declaration of Helsinki has been started. This article will identify the criticisms that have been made in the bioethics literature, particularly since the last revision. In addition, criticisms are discussed that were made in the literature even before the last revision and have not fallen silent.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Symptom checker apps (SCAs) are mobile or online applications for lay people that usually have two main functions: symptom analysis and recommendations. SCAs ask users questions about their symptoms via a chatbot, give a list with possible causes, and provide a recommendation, such as seeing a physician. However, it is unclear whether the actual performance of a SCA corresponds to the users' experiences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFKairos has been a key concept in medicine for millennia and is frequently understood as "the right time" in relation to treatment. In this study we scrutinize kairos in the context of diagnostics. This has become highly topical as technological developments have caused diagnostics to be performed ever earlier in the disease development.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe World Medical Association (WMA), the global representation of the medical profession, first adopted the International Code of Medical Ethics (ICoME) in 1949 to outline the professional duties of physicians to patients, other physicians and health professionals, themselves and society as a whole. The ICoME recently underwent a major 4-year revision process, culminating in its unanimous adoption by the WMA General Assembly in October 2022 in Berlin. This article describes and discusses the ICoME, its revision process, the controversial and uncontroversial issues, and the broad consensus achieved among WMA constituent members, representing over 10 million physicians worldwide.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Symptom checker apps (SCAs) are accessible tools that provide early symptom assessment for users. The ethical, legal, and social implications of SCAs and their impact on the patient-physician relationship, the health care providers, and the health care system have sparsely been examined. This study protocol describes an approach to investigate the possible impacts and implications of SCAs on different levels of health care provision.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe article critically responds to "A Planetary Health Pledge for Health Professionals in the Anthropocene" which was published by Wabnitz et al. in The Lancet in November 2020. It focuses on the different roles and responsibilities of a physician.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBundesgesundheitsblatt Gesundheitsforschung Gesundheitsschutz
October 2021
The worldwide development of twin cohorts began after World War II. These cohorts now include around 1.5 million twins, and more than 2748 twin studies have been published between 1950 and 2012.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndian J Med Ethics
May 2021
Vaccines preventing Covid-19 have been approved in several countries. Is it still ethically acceptable to use placebo controls during the development of other vaccine options? If two of the most influential international guidelines of biomedical research are consulted, the Declaration of Helsinki and the CIOMS-guidelines, the answer is "no". We discuss the implications for ongoing vaccine research, and how placebo controls might be justified nevertheless.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn March 2020, the rapid increase in severe COVID-19 cases overwhelmed the healthcare systems in several European countries. The capacities for artificial ventilation in intensive care units were too scarce to care for patients with acute respiratory disorder connected to the disease. Several professional associations published COVID-19 triage recommendations in an extremely short time: in 21 days between March 6 and March 27.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTo examine the hypothesis that normalization of low circulating leptin levels in patients with anorexia nervosa ameliorates hyperactivity, three seriously ill females with hyperactivity were treated off-label with metreleptin (recombinant human leptin) for up to 14 days. Drive for activity, repetitive thoughts of food, inner restlessness, and weight phobia decreased in two patients. Surprisingly, depression improved rapidly in all patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUterus transplantation (UTx) can provide a route to motherhood for women with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome (MRKHS), a congenital disorder characterized by uterovaginal aplasia, but with functional ovaries. Based on our four successful living-donor transplantations and two resulting births, this analysis presents parameters relevant to standardizing recipient/donor selection, UTx surgery, and postoperative treatment, and their implementation in routine settings. We descriptively analyzed prospectively collected observational data from our four uterus recipients, all with MRKHS, their living donors, and the two newborns born to two recipients, including 1-year postnatal follow-ups.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMed Health Care Philos
March 2020
The Hippocratic Oath and the Declaration of Geneva of the World Medical Association are compared in terms of content and origin. Their relevance for current medical practice is investigated. The status which is ascribed to these documents will be shown and the status which they can reasonably claim to have will be explored.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMed Health Care Philos
December 2019
Theranostics or theragnostics are new terms which start to appear occasionally in publications from 2001 onwards, with a marked increase in references from 2011. In the last few years more than 1100 articles using this term were published each year. In 2011 the journal Theranostics was founded.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSome of the recent criticisms published during and after the last revision process of the Declaration of Helsinki are directed at its basic legitimacy. In this article we want to have a closer look at the two criticisms we consider to be the most fundamental. The first criticism questions the legitimate authorship of the World Medical Association to publish a document such as the Declaration.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEur J Contracept Reprod Health Care
December 2017
Objectives: National registers which document assisted reproductive technology (ART) treatments are important for a range of stakeholders. Their websites and reports are a source of information for ART practitioners, (future) patients and the public. The aim of our study was to compare national ART registers in the three European countries with the largest populations and evaluate whether ART registers currently meet the information needs of the different groups.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMed Health Care Philos
December 2018
Personalized medicine plays an important role in the development of current medicine. Among the numerous statements regarding the future of personalized medicine, some can be found that accord medicine a new scientific status. Medicine will be transformed from an art to a science due to personalized medicine.
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