Clinical Reasoning in Health Care Ethics

Catalog description

This course is designed to familiarize students with ethical problems they will encounter during their medical careers. Whereas HCE 0101 provides the “grammar” of clinical ethics, introducing students to general principles, this course is an introduction to the “logic” of ethics, giving students the chance to apply such principles to clinical cases, just as they do in learning the principles of pathophysiology. The course is longitudinal and integrated into the other courses of the second year. The purpose of this design is to avoid allowing students to think of ethics as something external to clinical practice. Rather, ethical practice lies at the heart of medicine, and students must learn to think of themselves as moral agents even as they learn how to diagnose and treat patients.