[Loyola Crest]Seminar on Ethics in Clinical Medicine

Who, What, When and Where

Jack Corliss

Seminar meeting times (Lower Level Auditorium, Foster McGaw Hospital):
Mondays, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm (seminar meetings, guest speakers)
Thursdays, 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm (case study presentations)
Ethics Grand Rounds - as scheduled

Office Hours - by appointment
Phone: 708 - 216-8012
E-mail: jcorlis@luc.edu
URL: http://orion.it.luc.edu/~jcorlis/me780

Description

Seminar will follow developments in variety of ethical issues in clinical medicine, which include physician-assisted suicide, managed health care, organ donation, organ and tissue transplants, and abortion. Discussion will include theoretical and practical considerations.

Expectations

Students and residents will attend seminar meetings by guest speakers on Monday afternoon, from 4:00 pm through 5:30 pm. In addition, individual students will be required to prepare a case study in medical ethics, presenting the study and leading the discussion. These case studies will be derived from various topics presented in the readings or with the agreement of the seminar director. These case study presentations will be held on Thursday, from 2:30 pm through 4:00 pm.

In addition, students and residents are encouraged to attend ethics grand rounds which are scheduled on the second and fourth Wednesday every month (schedule will be posted on the seminar homepage, i.e., http://orion.it.luc.edu/~jcorlis/ME780/rounds, along with other seminar materials).

Every seminar participant will be required to have an e-mail account to participate regularly in the online seminar discussions. Some assignments will be delivered to the seminar director through e-mail. This syllabus, speaker schedule, reading list, assignments and grand rounds announcements are available at http://orion.it.luc.edu/~jcorlis/ME780.

The online discussion group for this seminar is luc.ssom.me780.

Seminar participants will be evaluated based upon two major writing assignments, seminar discussion and preparation (including participation in the online discussion group), and peer review of case study project.

Selected Assignments

  1. Develop a compendium of resources materials to facilitate discussion on ethical issues surrounding organ transplants, beginning with the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) Bioethics Online Service which is accessible through the Medical College of Wisconsin homepage, i.e., http://www.mcw.edu/bioethics. At this point, check out the different offerings.

  2. Using the MCW Bioethics Online Services, locate under bioethics texts, the guide Practical Ethics for Resident Physicians by Drs. Junkerman and Schiedermayer, and review material regarding brain death, organ donations and transplants.

  3. Organ, tissue and whole body donations

    1. Locate material regarding the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act
    2. What constitutes consent?
    3. What are the criteria for organ donations?

    Questions for online discussion:

    Should organ donors say who should get their organs, i.e., "directed donations"? To what extent can an organ donation be specifically directed, e.g., can a donor make restrictions regarding gender, race or ethnicity?

  4. Organ and tissue transplants

    1. Consider some of the ethical considerations:

      - right to access
      - waiting lists
      - commercial providers of tissue and organs
      - managed care
      - quality of life
      - brain death
      - use of dead criminals

    2. How do these questions turn on the nature of the organ transplant?

    Question for online discussion:

    Should prisoners receive organ transplants?

  5. Cadaver ethics:

    1. Search the MCW Bioethics Online Service for journal articles on cadaver ethics.
    2. Search CARL Uncover for other related materials.

  6. There are several electronic scholarly discussion groups focused on medical ethics:

    - MCW-ETHICS
    subscription address: listproc@its.mcw.edu

    - BIOMED-L
    subscription address: listserv@vm1.nodak.edu

    Subscribe to these discussion groups and follow the discussions (and feel free to participate). What are the "hot" issues in medical ethics?

  7. Use a WWW search engine (like Webcrawler at http://webcrawler.com) and locate another electronic (not necessarily scholarly but very informative) discussion group for those who have received organ transplants.

    One good suggestion for search criteria: transplant

  8. Locate any bulletin board services (BBS), also called Usenet newsgroups (yes, a BBS and an Usenet newsgroup are indeed one and the same) which focus on medical ethics. What are the hot issues? You can use the same WWW search engine to help find them, e.g.,

    bit.listserv.ethics-l
    http://golgi.harvard.edu/biopages).

Contact Information

If you have any questions and suggestions please feel free to send them to the seminar director through e-mail at jcorlis@luc.edu.

This page was developed as a demonstration of an "hypertext" syllabus for the Enhancing the Teaching Culture at Loyola University Chicago workshops held on Thursday, January 11, 1996. Please send comments, suggestions and questions to the Page Developer.

[Loyola Crest] Loyola University Chicago

revised: January 4, 1996
author: Jack Corliss jcorlis@luc.edu. All contents copyright (C) 1996, Loyola University Chicago.
URL: http://orion.it.luc.edu/~jcorlis/me780/index.html