The harms of communicating autism risk can be avoided by helping families to understand risk and to distinguish between poor and good sources of scientific information, which should take families’ interests into account.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(4):323-327. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.4.nlit1-1504.
B. Rashmi Borah, Nicolle K. Strand, JD, MBioethics, and Kata L. Chillag, PhD
The Bioethics Commission’s recommendations to include research participants with impaired consent capacity provide an ethical foundation for neuroscience.
AMA J Ethics. 2016;18(12):1192-1198. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2016.18.12.nlit1-1612.
Framing discussions of ALS around the disease rather than the psychologically complex person with the disease focuses attention on symptoms and imagined outcomes rather than patients’ coping strategies and quality of life.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(6):530-534. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.6.nlit2-1506.
The 2013 BRAIN Research Initiative calls for the integration of ethics into medical education and all levels of research, from hypothesis generation to evaluation, which promises to provide an ethical foundation for all future biomedical research.
Our ability to infer mental states from fMRI scans is still rudimentary, but the time may be approaching when neuroimaging can be used to indicate witnesses’ reliability in court proceedings.
While it is important to make parents of severely neurologically damaged newborns aware of the difficulty in predicting their child’s survival chances or future disabilities, it is also crucial to inform them of the statistical evidence about outcomes for their child’s condition.
The early diagnosis of Alzheimer disease is a boon in that it enables advance planning, but that planning process can engender conflict between respect for future-oriented autonomy and future welfare.