Medical ethics

Medical ethics is the discipline of evaluating the merits, risks, and social
concerns of activities in the field of medicine.

Many methods have been come up to help evaluate the ethics of a situation.
These methods tend to introduce principles that should be thought about in
the process of making a decision.

Six of the principles commonly included are:

   * Beneficence - this means that a practitioner should act in the best
     interest of the patient.
   * Non-maleficence - from the Hippocratic Oath, "never do harm".
   * Autonomy - means that the patient should have the right to decide on
     their treatment.
   * Justice - concerns the distribution of scarce health resources, and the
     decision of who gets what treatment.
   * Dignity - the patient (and the person treating the patient) should be
     given the right to dignity.
   * Truthfulness - the patient should not be lied to, and deserves to know
     the whole truth about their illness.

Principles like these are not designed to give answers as to how to handle a
situation, and they will often overlap or contradict each other (for
instance autonomy and beneficence clash if a patient refuses a life-saving
blood transfusion). These principles are intended as guidelines as to what
needs to be considered for particular issue or situation.

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