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Ethics of Everyday Medicine: Explorations of Justice examines and analyses the relatively unexplored domain of ethics involved in the everyday practice of medicine. From the author's clinical experience, virtually every decision made in the day-to-day practice of medicine is fundamentally an ethical question, as virtually every decision hinge on some value judgment that goes beyond the medical facts of the matter.
The first part of the book is devoted to medical decision cases in several areas of medicine. These cases highlight elements of the current healthcare ecosystem, involving players other than the physician and patient. Insurers (private, commercial, and governmental), administrators, and regulators' perspectives are surfaced in point of care case analysis. Part two contributes to the development of actionable tools to develop better ethical systems for the everyday practice of medicine by providing a critical analysis of Reflective Equilibrium and ethical induction from the perspective of logic and statistics. The chapter on Justice discusses the neurophysiological representations of just and unjust behaviours. The chapter on Ethical Theories follows, describing the epistemic conundrum, principlism, reproducibility, abstraction, chaos and complexity. The following chapter approaches ethical decisions from the logic and statistic perspectives. The following chapter, The Patient as Parenthetical, the author discusses patient-centric ethics, and the rise of business- and government-cetric ethics. The final chapter, A Framework to Frame the Questions for Explore Further, proposes a working framework to deal with current ethical issues.
Ethics of everyday Medicine: Explorations of Justice acknowledges that there are no answers yet to the ethical dilemmas that confront the everyday practice of medicine, but proposes a framework for deeper analysis and action. This reading would be useful to all healthcare professionals. Regulators and policy makers could also benefit from understanding how the complex healthcare environment influences medical decisions at point of care.
List of contents
1. Justice2. Ethical Systems3. Reflective Equilibrium from the Perspective of Logic and Statistics4. The Patient as Parenthetical5. A Workable Framework6. Justice7. Ethical Systems8. Reflective Equilibrium from the Perspective of Logic and Statistics9. The Patient as Parenthetical10. A Workable Framework
About the author
Dr. Montgomery has been an academic neurologist for over 40 years pursuing teaching, clinical and basic research at major academic medical centers. He has authored over 120 peer reviewed journal articles (available on PubMed) and 8 books on medicine (4 on the subject of Deep Brain Stimulation). The last two have been “Reproducibility in Biomedical Research” (Academic Press, 2024) and “The Ethics of Everyday Medicine” (Academic Press, 2023).
Report
"The book appears to offer a very thoughtful consideration of principalist and non-principalist approaches to medical decision-making. As someone who is not a clinician, philosopher, or normative bioethics researcher, the language and the scope of discussion was out of range for me and I struggled to follow discussions through the chapters. For philosophers with training in logic and an interest in neuroethics, chapters of this book may serve to engage them in bioethics." --© Doody's Review Service, 2020, Janet Elizabeth Childerhose, PhD, reviewer, expert opinion
