Indian journal of medical ethics
-
Understanding the medical humanities (MH) and their role in medical education is in its infancy in India. Students are initiated into professional (medical) education too early in life, usually at the expense of a basic grounding in the humanities, resulting in warped intellectual growth. ⋯ This essay describes the early experiences of efforts to make a beginning at the University College of Medical Sciences, Delhi. The author reviews the various strategies used and the challenges of introducing the subject to the current generation of medical students.
-
Debates in India on end-of-life care assumed a new life after the petition in the Supreme Court in the case of Aruna Ramchandra Shanbaug, calling for withdrawal of life-sustaining therapy from a patient in a persistent vegetative state. The Court's landmark decision has led the way for discussing and developing guidelines on various situations in end-of- life care. This paper discusses some key concepts in end-of-life care - medical futility, palliative care, advance directives, surrogate decision making, physician assisted suicide and euthanasia - with reference to the guidelines of various medical associations and decisions in Indian courts.
-
Indian J Med Ethics · Jul 2012
Embracing the unknown: introducing medical humanities into the undergraduate medical curriculum in India.
Medical education fails to address the medical student's many questions, doubts and anxieties about his profession and his own relation to it. Students' growing disillusionment with the profession and increasing disconnect with the realities of the healthcare scene in India have reached critical levels, resulting in a general clamour for reform of the medical curriculum. ⋯ Some guidelines are offered for starting an MH programme, stressing the need for a flexible and broad-based approach, and a participatory pedagogy focused on students' needs, that draws creatively on available resources. Rather than viewing the 'arts' as a discrete addition to our personalities, an MH programme needs to show us how to integrate the multiple facets of our personalities.
-
It was hoped that following polio eradication, immunisation could be stopped. However the synthesis of polio virus in 2002, made eradication impossible. It is argued that getting poor countries to expend their scarce resources on an impossible dream over the last 10 years was unethical. ⋯ Though this data was collected within the polio surveillance system, it was not investigated. The principle of primum-non-nocere was violated. The authors suggest that the huge bill of US$ 8 billion spent on the programme, is a small sum to pay if the world learns to be wary of such vertical programmes in the future.