Essay on Bio Medical Ethics Final

DCD Case Study Imagine, for one moment, that you are faced with a medical emergency, and there is no one around to assist you. You manage to call the paramedics, and you are still alive when they get there, but they do nothing to try and save you, therefor causing your death. Is this an ethical violation? What about what happens to you after your death? These are some issues that I would like to discuss in this essay. I will present to you the ethical issues of a doctor or medical personnel’s responsibility to the patient, the idea of permanence, and the issue of informed consent when it comes to life saving maneuvers, and organ donation. Organ donation is a program that performs a great service for the recipients of said organs, but has been causing some issues with obtaining the organs. Due to the lack of organs available, the medical community is trying to change the definition of death so that more people could possibly become organ donors. The problem with redefining death in this manner is that it raises the question of whether the doctors would then work as hard as they could and use all of their skills to try and save you, or where they would have the right to stop treatment so that you may become an organ donor. While this seems like a ridiculous idea to entertain, since it is unethical to not do everything within your capabilities to save a patient, these things do happen. The only way that a doctor would not be obligated to use all of their skill to save you would be if there were an advanced directive document in place specifically stating the patient’s wishes. If a patient doesn’t wish to be resuscitated, then the doctor has no obligation to try and save them. He is then free to approach next of kin to ask for the donation of organs if there has been no preference stated in any previous legal document. If there is no advanced directive, then the doctor has an ethical obligation to perform all life-saving procedures available. The reason that the doctors obligation is in question at all, is that the standard for organ donation has always been when an individual is brain dead, they are then eligible donors. By changing to cardiac death, this would allow more patients to become donors, as there are an untold amount of deaths that involve cardiac death before or concurrent with brain death. This leads to the issue of permanence. If a person is brain dead, there will never be a recovery for the patient. If a person is in cardiac arrest, then it might be possible to start the heart again with the use of CPR. When a brain is dead, it is permanently dead. When a cardiac death occurs, there is always the possibility that it can be reversed. This is also a major basis in the ethical issue of if the heart were truly dead, or permanently dead, then it would be ineligible for transplant to an organ recipient, for if the heart can be restarted in another body, then it is clearly not permanently dead. Choosing not to try and reverse this condition in an emergency situation violates the ethical obligation that a doctor has to his patient. You could approach a family member or power of attorney for instructions, but studies have shown that only approximately a

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