Critical care clinics
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This article identifies the ethical principles that have guided medicine since antiquity: beneficence, primum non nocere, patient autonomy, and respect for life and the quality of life. The author's basic premise is that many recently publicized ethical dilemmas are really not dilemmas--the knowledge of what is good or evil is not confused, contradictory, or absent. Instead, medicine's concern and responsibility to its patients is being clouded by legal, governmental, or societal concerns.
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Critical care clinics · Jan 1986
ReviewBlood transfusions and Jehovah's Witnesses. The impact of the patient's unusual beliefs in critical care.
This article explains the belief of Jehovah's Witnesses regarding blood transfusions, and argues that a physician must ethically respect that belief.
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Critical care clinics · Jan 1986
Comparative StudyEthical decision making and the critical care team.
This article studies the process of decision making used to arrive at decisions to withdraw treatment in the adult and neonatal intensive care unit. The emerging role of team decision making is described as a cumulative process of dialogue between the health care team and the patient's family (including the patient in some cases).
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This article reviews the cardiac sequelae of blunt chest injury. Major cardiac injuries of blunt chest trauma involve damage to the myocardium, although pericardial disease, valvular heart disease, and coronary artery disease may result. Recognition of the various syndromes associated is discussed, and a synthesis of diagnostic and management strategies for speculation is provided.