Medical Ethics

Catalog description

Examination of ethical issues in the practice of medicine. Course examines the concepts of well-being, autonomy, health, and disease; the ethics of informed consent; problems of capacity assessment; ethics of making decisions for incompetent patients; ethical issues of advance directives; the ethics of legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia. Course also looks at ethical dimensions of decision-making for particular vulnerable groups: elderly dementia patients, permanently unconscious patients, impaired newborns, people with various disabilities. The focus is on clinical medicine, but the course serves also as a foundation for further study in bioethics.