|
| Ethics and Infectious Disease | 
 enlarge | Creators: Michael Selgelid, Margaret P. Battin, Charles B. Smith
Publisher: Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Category: Book
List Price: £20.99
Buy New: £16.88
You Save: £4.11 (20%)
New (11) Used (3) from £16.88
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 1331055
Media: Paperback
Edition: New title
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 140514596X
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.1969
EAN: 9781405145961
Publication Date: August 15, 2006
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: New book. Due to problems with Standard Airmail delivery times from the USA, we have switched to using PRIORITY AIRMAIL ONLY. UK & European delivery is 7-10 days.
|
| Customer Reviews:
A mixed bag November 10, 2007
A mixed bag. The more specific articles were better, the general ones tended to wind up with boring claims no one could disagree with, eg "We believe that a new paradigm for eithcs of infectious diseases will evolve..." (page 34) or "These challenges raised by infectious disease are serious ones." (I have never read any bioethicist claim a challenge is trivial).
The ethicists induce a lot of complexity, probably partly unwittingly, into their ethical statements. For example "clinicians are obligated to fully assess the many individual, social and structural barriers which may negatively impact people's medication-taking" (pg 198). How clinicians are to take on this herculean task, and how they are to even know when they have "fully assess[ed]" all the barriers is a trivial matter beneath the attention of this writer, let alone how on earth they are meant to find all the time to do this. Or on page 34, the article states that in 2002 "the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health reported that the world now has the capability of ending poverty and poverty-associated diseases for the first time in hiStory. The cost to the rich developed nations would be only one cent out of every $10 of domestic product". This apparently blithely ignores all the political barriers to ending poverty, or that it is not a matter of money, we don't know how to grow the institutions that cause prosperity in countries that don't have them.
The section on "Duty to Treat or Right to Refuse" was puzzlingly incomplete. It starts off by talking about the case of a doctor who refused to treat a patient potentially-infected with HIV, and discusses the concern of the doctor about risking not merely himself but his wife. But this family concern is then weirdly dropped, the author concludes that doctors have a duty to treat patients during epidemics like SARs and thus for AIDS, but then doesn't discuss what this means for the doctor's family life. A doctor may be prepared to stay well away from his family for a month or a year or so to protect them from the doctor's exposure during an epidemic like SARS, but to not have a family life for a whole lifetime is an extra burden. Is that justified, or should the family take on the risk? The article is incomplete.
To summarise, I think the way forward for bioethics, based on this book is to focus on specific issues. I also think they should pay some attention to the practicalities of their ethical pronouncements.
|
|
|
© StudentMidwife.NET. All Rights Reserved | |
