wrong choice because it's easier or more convenient). But some of the ethical choices
faced by health care providers are not so easily resolved, as we shall see in the next
segment.
1-3.
ETHICS, A PHILOSOPHIC STUDY OF IDEAL BEHAVIOR
a. Treating All Patients the Same. When personal beliefs, attitudes, and
values are at cross-purposes with the code of ethics, it becomes hard to live up to
ethical principles, which are ideal standards of behavior. For example, principle three of
the code of ethics asks radiographers to "deliver patient care unrestricted by the
concerns of personal attributes or the nature of the disease and without
discrimination..." (See Appendix A, Code of Ethics.)
b. The Socially Undesirable or Nuisance Patient. What happens when the
health care professional is confronted with a dirty, smelly alcoholic who repeatedly uses
a hospital stay as a way of catching his or her second wind before the next drunken
binge? Is the alcoholic likely to be the recipient of the same level of care and
compassion as any other patient? Personal beliefs, attitudes, and values about
cleanliness, alcoholism, and being a responsible citizen may put the health care
provider in conflict with the code of ethics.
c. Care of the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome Patient. What about
the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) patient? How does the health care
provider balance the sometimes legitimate (sometimes irrational) concern for his or her
own health with the moral requirement to provider care, compassion, and contact
comfort to a dying patient? Consider the provider who refuses to care for AIDS
patients, or the one who keeps his or her distance (avoiding close physical contact, eye
contact, or a comforting word or gesture). When health care providers keep their
distance, are they acting out of self-interest (putting their own well-being before that of
the patient)? Is a concern for one's own safety an equally valid moral imperative (a
legitimate concern for the sanctity of all life, one's own included)?
(1) Refusal to provide care. The AIDS discrimination hot lines receive
frequent reports from individuals with the disease who have been refused treatment by
doctors and dentists. Do doctors have this right? One recent poll of 54,000 physicians
found that 50 percent believed they did and 15 percent said they would actually refuse
to provide care.6 What do you think? Is the answer as clear-cut for you as it is for the
doctors who say, "no" or the American Medical Association (AMA) that says, "yes?" Is it
a tough choice, but a choice, nonetheless, in which treating the patient is the higher
moral imperative? Or is it a moral dilemma in which equally important moral
imperatives stand in conflict with each other?
(2)
The needle stick case.
(a) Dr. Veronica Prego (perhaps by now decreased) is a 32-year-old
doctor who contracted AIDS from an inadvertent stick from a discarded needle that was
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