What is medical ethics?
Medical ethics is an interdisciplinary teaching - and research - subject that empirically and analytically studies ethical aspects of health care and medical research. It is thus an area within applied ethics.
In medical ethics, basic ethical theories and principles are used to analyze and answer ethical questions that arise in the practice of healthcare and medical research. Empirical research is also used to obtain information of ethical relevance.
Medical ethics is taught at a number of undergraduate and graduate programs at Karolinska Institutet. Medical research ethics is also a compulsory subject for everyone who is a postgraduate student at KI.
Examples of issues in health care ethics
• How and on what grounds should priority setting be done in health care?
• How important is it for the patient to have a say about their own care - and why?
• Should doctors always save lives in the first place - or can, for example, physician-assisted suicide be an acceptable alternative in some situations?
• Should healthcare professionals refuse to provide care and treatment if it goes against their own values?
• Is it justifiable for publicly funded healthcare to include new, extremely expensive treatments?
Examples of questions in medical research ethics
• What is good research practice and what constitute unacceptable deviations?
• How can good research practice be promoted?
• How should the respective responsibilities be handled between collaborating researchers if research fraud or deviations are discovered?
• Why is informed consent important - and why can one still approve research that is not preceded by informed consent from the researchers?
• How should co-authorship of scientific articles be managed in an ethically defensible way?
Case archive
Here you will find several ethical cases related to healthcare and research ethics. Feel free to help expand the case archive – or develop cases together with the medical ethicists at LIME.
Newsletter on ethics in healthcare
Would you like to subscribe to a newsletter about ethics? CHE's senior advisor Marie Chenik compiles weekly news and information, in Swedish, with the aim of making it easier for all interested parties to follow and understand ethical issues in healthcare, as well as to stimulate ethical work and ethics debate.
Advice on literature
- Beauchamp T, Childress JF, Principles of Biomedical Ethics. 8 ed. Oxford University Press, 2019
- Helgesson G. Forskningsetik. Second edition. Studentlitteratur, 2015