Debate over the relationship of law and bioethics is growing - what the relationship has been and what it should be in the future. While George Annas has praised law and rights-talk for creating modern bioethics, Carl Schneider has instead blamed law for hijacking bioethics and stunting moral reflection. Indeed, as modern bioethics approaches the 40-year mark, historians of bioethics are presenting divergent accounts. In one account, typified by Albert Jonsen, bioethics largely grew out of philosophy and theology, not law. (...) In another account, law has deeply shaped bioethics from the start, forging its central commitment to the rights of patients and research subjects and the fields imposition of broad fiduciary responsibilities on health care professionals and researchers.In addition to debating how to properly describe laws historical relationship to bioethics, commentators have argued over whether laws influence in bioethics is now good or bad. (shrink)

In the lead article in this symposium issue, Edward Imwinkelried follows other scholars in distinguishing among three types of tasks for ethicists serving as expert witnesses: descriptive ; metaethical ; and normative. He finds agreement that the admissibility of descriptive or metaethical evidence rests upon the usual criteria of helpfulness and reliability. He breaks new ground in arguing that normative evidence typically relates to the judge's legislative rather than adjudicative function and therefore need not satisfy the usual standards for admissibility (...) in order to be considered. (shrink)

The discussion about complementary and alternative medicine is sometimes rather heated. “Quackery!” the cry goes. A large proportion “of unconventional practices entail theories that are patently unscientific.” “It is time for the scientific community to stop giving alternative medicine a free ride. There cannot be two kinds of medicine — conventional and alternative. There is only medicine that has been adequately tested and medicine that has not, medicine that works and medicine that may or may not work.” “I submit that (...) if these treatments cannot withstand the test of empirical research, … then we have wasted a lot of time and effort. The time has been wasted on all the people who have spent years learning falsehoods about acupuncture points and the principles of homeopathy. And the patients have wasted their time, money, and efforts receiving treatments that were not what they were represented to be or were harmful.”. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 3, Page 1-3, March 2012.

Health-care provider liability has again taken center stage in American political debate, but with an ironic twist. In the seventies, physicians wanted tort reform, but they measured such reform solely by a reduction in both the risk of being sued and the size of any judgment a plaintiff could win. Malpractice reforms in many states in the seventies therefore capped damages, reduced contingency awards to lawyers, and restricted other tort rules to limit plaintiff success. Today physicians are conflicted. They want (...) an increase in liability exposure — not for themselves, but for managed care plans. We have therefore ended up with a series of overlapping debates, with the same debaters taking contradictory positions. Should managed care organizations—until now protected by ERISA preemption from liability—be liable? Physicians say yes. But should physicians be protected from the threat of suit, which they argue acts as an in terrorem device that drives disclosure of medical errors into hiding? (shrink)

The organizational self-assessment tool presented in this issue (Wynia et al. 2004) is a valuable contribution not merely to the ethics literature, but also, one hopes, to health insurer practice....