Ethical Problems in Emergency Medicine (eBook)

Ethical Problems in Emergency Medicine 3
Contents 7
Contributors 11
Preface 15
Section One: Challenging professionalism 17
1: Physician care of family, friends, or colleagues 19
2: The impaired physician 31
3: Disclosure of medical error and truth telling 43
4: Conflicts between patient requests and physician obligations 53
5: Judgmental attitudes and opinions in the emergency department 63
6: Using physicians as agents of the state 73
Section Two: End-of-life decisions 83
7: Family-witnessed resuscitation in the emergency department: making sense of ethical and practical considerations in an emotional debate 85
8: Palliative care in the emergency department 95
9: Refusal of life-saving therapy 105
10: Revisiting comfort-directed therapies: death and dying in the emergency department, including withholding and withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment 115
11: Futility in emergency medicine 133
Section Three: Representing vulnerable populations 143
12: The care of minors in the emergency department 145
13: Chemical restraints, physical restraints, and other demonstrations of force 155
14: Capacity determination in the patient with altered mental status 165
15: Obstetric emergency: perimortem cesarean section 173
Section Four: Outside influence and observation 183
16: Non-medical observers in the emergency department 185
17: Religious perspectives on do-notresuscitate (DNR) documents and the dying patient 195
18: Non-physician influence on the scope and responsibilities of emergency physicians 203
19: Privacy and confidentiality: particular challenges in the emergency department 213
Section Five: Emergency medicine outside the emergency department 223
20: Short-term international medical initiatives 225
21: Disaster triage 237
22: The emergency physician as a bystander outside the hospital 253
23: Military objectives versus patient interests 263
Section Six: Public health as emergency medicine 275
24: Treatment of potential organ donors 277
25: Mandatory and permissive reporting laws: conflicts in patient confidentiality, autonomy, and the duty to report 287
26: Ethics of care during a pandemic 303
Section Seven: Education and research 315
27: Practicing medical procedures on the newly or nearly dead 317
28: Ethics of research without informed consent 327
Appendix: useful resources 337
Index 341