AMA Journal of Ethics

One health professions school views the Holocaust as fundamental content knowledge in modern health care ethics, but teaching it is difficult.

The Nuremberg Code, the World Medical Association’s declarations of Geneva and Helsinki, and the Belmont Report share an origin in the Holocaust.

Sterilization requires physicians’ surgical skills. Forced sterilization requires many clinicians’ complicity.

Connections between racism and dehumanization have immediate, lethal, deleterious, longer-term consequences. Lessons from Nazi eugenics and human experimentation still apply.

For many physicians, lack of understanding about brain death leads to confusion and muddles interactions with patients’ loved ones at the end of life.

Criteria in statutes and tests used to diagnose brain death don’t always jibe, and this can undermine public trust in death pronouncements.

A patient’s transition from “living” to “dying” is not socially marked in the same way death is marked, and this is both clinically and ethically relevant.

Religious and cultural values can conflict with clinical standard practice and law.

Since 1995, the American Academy of Neurology has provided guidelines for brain death determination, but nationwide adherence to these guidelines has been incomplete.

Public awareness of brain death is based largely on inaccurate media representations. It’s no wonder so few of us understand brain death.