What is bioethics and why it is so important nowadays.
Bioethics is connected with:
• Animal rights;
• Environmental ethics;
• Medical ethics
Each of these sections is large and connected with different complicated problems.
Medical ethics contain rights of patents and rights of peoples that employed in health care, also medical ethics determines obligations for peoples that employed in health care. Medical ethics is that part from bioethics that try to protect human rights to self-determination what is endanger by authority of peoples that employed in health care, and evaluate the relationship what exist between patient and peoples that employed in health care.
Main guidelines in medical ethics.
• the autonomy patient;
• prevent to harm a patient
• helping a patient and goodwill
• altruism
• confidentiality and privacy
• principle of fair-dealing
• e.t.c.
Medical ethics and genetic counseling.
Genetic counseling is a communication process which deals with the human problems associated with the occurrence, or the risk of occurrence, of a genetic disorder in a family. This process involves an attempt by one or more appropriately trained persons to help the individual or family to:
o comprehend the medical facts, including the diagnosis probable course of the disorder, and the available management;
o appreciate the way heredity contributes to the disorder, and the risk of recurrence in specified relatives;
o understand the alternatives for dealing with the risk of recurrence;
o choose the course of action which seems to them appropriate in view of their risk, their family goals, and their ethical and religious standards, and to act in accordance with that decision; and
o to make the best possible adjustment to the disorder in affected family member and/or to the risk of recurrence of that disorder.
But there are also some big and important problems that connected with bioethics:
• how to preserve the autonomous nature of decision making;
• how to obtain nondirectiveness from genetic counselor (counselors should strive not to influence their clients);
• how to preserve right to now or right not to know about genetic disease;
• and how to provide confidentiality and privacy;
What Is Bioethics And Why Is It So Important Nowadays?
Coexistence of man and nature is matter-of-course. Man lives in nature, uses nature for his own purpose. All along man has tried to accomplish the world around him to make it better for living. It made man an exclusive mammal inhabits up almost all the planet - from North to South Pole, beginning with deserts of sand and ending with deep jungle of Amazon. But now man has reached the level of knowledge and power enough to affect nature. Actions of man affect such things as natural factors, climate, and aerial of inhabiting of other creatures. However, man in most cases can’t predict sequences and acts conscientiously, so he causes harm and damage to nature. To provide the safety of nature and live creatures some concepts of right treatment had been established. One of sciences dealing with such problems is Bioethics.
Bioethics as a theoretical and practical science developed only in the 20th century. However its roots come from Antinity: some bioethical problems also had been discussed by Hypocrite in his works. Also after Hypocrite occasionally there were thinkers who actualized some problems nowadays known as the problems of bioethics, for example Thomas Aquinas, Hobbes, Kant.
Modern understanding of Bioethics is changing quite quickly and its subject is expending, because of the development of other sciences. Different discoveries cause different new problems, and bioethics has to move along with discoveries of other sciences. Bioethics should always stay up-to-date.
The latest view about bioethics is that:
bioethics is the discipline dealing with the ethical implications of both biological research and the applications of that research, especially in medicine. Such moral issues as racial and sexual equality, human rights, and justice have become prominent, as have questions about thevalue of human life raised by controversies over abortion and euthanasia. Related to the latter are the ethical implications of various developments in regard to reproduction as, for example, in vitro fertilization, sperm banks, gene manipulation, and cloning. This field of applied ethics, known as bioethics, frequently involves the cooperative efforts of philosophers, physicians, scientists, lawyers, and theologians.
The rise of bioethics is traceable to several events. First, although ethical issues have been raised in medicine and biology since ancient times (witness, for instance, the Hippocratic oath), the large-scale introduction of biomedical and other technologies in the second half of the 20th century has intensified old problems and added new ones—such as issues over the definition of death and the withdrawal of life-sustaining medical treatment, prenatal diagnosis and abortion, the storage of frozen human embryos, the use of humans, animals, or fetal tissue for scientific research, the screening of persons for the AIDS virus or other infections, the disposition of toxic wastes, the expansion of genetic engineering, and the allocation of scarce health resources. Second, awareness of bioethics and other moral issues has been dramatically raised; professionals and students now routinely raise ethical questions. In the course of such questioning, bioethics has affected philosophy, pushing it to pay more attention to practical problems. Finally, the growth of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work in academic institutions has facilitated dealing concurrently with biological research and with moral and socialissues of human behaviour.
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