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We have examined healthcare staff attitudes of toward a blogging cancer patient who publishes critical posts about her treatment and their possible effect on patient-staff relationships and treatment decisions.
The widespread sharing of biological and biomedical data is recognised as a key element in facilitating translation of scientific discoveries into novel clinical applications and services. At the same time, tw...
Personalized medicine (PM) aims to tailor disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment to individuals on the basis of their genes, lifestyle and environments. Patient and interest organizations (PIOs) may pote...
Research ethics review is a critical aspect of the research governance framework for human subjects research. This usually requires that research protocols be submitted to a research ethics committee (REC) for...
The ethical concerns associated with HIV prevention and treatment research have been widely explored in South Africa over the past 3 decades. However, HIV cure research is relatively new to the region and sign...
Drug user networks and community-based organizations advocate for greater, meaningful involvement of people with lived experience of drug use in research, programs and services, and policy initiatives. Communi...
Surveys on attitudes towards assisted dying play an important role in informing public debate, policy and legislation. Unfortunately, surveys are often designed with insufficient attention to framing effects; ...
In research ethics, the most basic question would always be, “which is an ethical issue, which is not?” Interestingly, depending on which ethics guideline we consult, we may have various answers to this questi...
Recently, significant research effort has focused on using Twitter (and other social media) to investigate mental health at the population-level. While there has been influential work in developing ethical gui...
The state of the world is one with scarce medical resources where longevity is not equally distributed. Given such facts, setting priorities in health entails making difficult yet unavoidable decisions about w...
The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Recommendations set ethical and editorial standards for article publication in most leading medical journals. Here, I examine the strengths and weakn...
Since 2006, the genetic testing company 23andMe has collected biological samples, self-reported information, and consent documents for biobanking and research from more than 1,000,000 individuals (90 % partici...
Although some of the most radical hypothesis related to the practical implementations of human enhancement have yet to become even close to reality, the use of cognitive enhancers is a very tangible phenomenon...
To determine whether the public and scientists consider common arguments (and counterarguments) in support (or not) of animal research (AR) convincing.
In the field of health technology assessment (HTA), there are several approaches that can be used for ethical analysis. However, there is a scarcity of literature that critically evaluates and compares the str...
Balancing the rights and obligations of custodians and applicants in relation to access to biobanks is of utmost importance to guarantee trust and confidence. This study aimed to reveal which issues divide dif...
In many countries health insurers, employers and especially governments are increasingly using pressure and coercion to enhance healthier lifestyles. For example by ever higher taxes on cigarettes and alcoholi...
Although the “right not to know” is well established in international regulations, it has been heavily debated. Ubiquitous results from extended exome and genome analysis have challenged the right not to know....
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Medical Ethics 2016 17:35
Obstetrics and gynaecology always has reputation for being a highly litigious. The field of obstetrics and gynaecology is surrounded by different circumstances that stimulate the doctors to practice defensive ...
The editors of BMC Medical Ethics would like to thank all our reviewers who have contributed to the journal in Volume 16 (2015).
The global interest in developing therapies for Ebola infection management and its prevention is laudable. However the plan to conduct an emergency immunization program specifically for healthcare workers usin...
In specific situations it may be necessary to make an exception to the general rule of informed consent for scientific research with an intervention. Earlier reviews only described subsets of arguments for exc...
The academic and medical literature highlights the positive effects of empathy for patient care. Yet, very little attention has been given to the impact of the requirement for empathy on the physicians themsel...
Although values have increasingly received attention in psychiatric literature over the last three decades, their role has been only partially acknowledged in psychiatric classification endeavors. The review p...
Access to research volunteers may be hampered by low numbers of cases and few eligible participants for rare diseases in clinical settings.
Ethically challenging critical events and decisions are common in nursing homes. This paper presents nursing home doctors’ descriptions of how they include the patient and next of kin in end-of-life decisions.
Depressive disorders are a common form of psychiatric illness and cause significant disability. Regulation authorities, the medical profession and the public require high safety standards for antidepressants t...
Informed consent is a key element of ethical clinical research. Addicted population may be at risk for impaired consent capacity. However, very little research has focused on their comprehension of consent for...
Current guidelines do not clearly outline when assent should be attained from paediatric research participants, nor do they detail the necessary elements of the assent process. This stems from the fact that th...
Public involvement activities are promoted as measures for ensuring good governance in challenging fields, such as biomedical research and innovation. Proponents of public involvement activities include indivi...
The Catalan Institute of Health (CIH) is the largest health services public provider in Catalonia. “CIH Code of Ethics Virtual Forum” (CEVF), was created within the Intranet of the CIH to facilitate participat...
Street-connected children and youth (SCCY) in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) have multiple vulnerabilities in relation to participation in research. These require additional considerations that are re...
Identifying biomarkers for autism can improve outcomes for those affected by autism. Engaging the diverse stakeholders in the research process using community-based participatory research (CBPR) can accelerate...
Genealogical research and ancestry testing are popular recreational activities but little is known about the impact of the use of these services on clients’ biological and social families. Ancestry databases a...
Informed consent as stipulated in regulatory human research guidelines requires that a volunteer is well-informed about what will happen to them in a trial. However researchers are faced with a challenge of ho...
In December 2014, China announced that only voluntarily donated organs from citizens would be used for transplantation after January 1, 2015. Many medical professionals worldwide believe that China has stopped...
While ethicists have for many years called for human subject trial participants and, in some cases, local community members to benefit from participation in pharmaceutical and other intervention-based therapie...
This paper discusses the contentious issue of reuse of stored biological samples and data obtained from research participants in past clinical research to answer future ethical and scientifically valid researc...
The increasing emphasis on research, development and innovation for health in providing solutions to the high burden of diseases in the African Region has warranted a proliferation of studies including clinica...
End-of-life decisions remain a hotly debated issue in many European countries and the acceptance in the general population can act as an important anchor point in these discussions. Previous studies on determi...
The pharmaceutical market in Bangladesh is highly concentrated (top ten control around 70 % of the market). Due to high competition aggressive marketing strategies are adopted for greater market share, which s...
A key ethical issue arising in data linkage research relates to consent requirements. Patients’ consent preferences in the context of health research have been explored but their consent preferences regarding ...
Implementation science research, especially when using participatory and co-design approaches, raises unique challenges for research ethics committees. Such challenges may be poorly addressed by approval and g...
The integrity of biomedical research depends heavily on the quality of research data collected. In turn, data quality depends on processes of data collection, a task undertaken by frontline research staff in m...
For many decades, the debate on children’s competence to give informed consent in medical settings concentrated on ethical and legal aspects, with little empirical underpinnings. Recently, data from empirical ...
In 2004, patient advocate groups were major players in helping pass and implement significant public policy and funding initiatives in stem cells and regenerative medicine. In the following years, advocates we...
Although law is established on a strong presumption that persons younger than a certain age are not competent to consent, statutory age limits for asking children’s consent to clinical research differ widely i...
Prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV remains a key public health priority in most developing countries. The provider Initiated Opt – Out Prenatal HIV Screening Approach, recommended by the World H...
The aim of this study was to review the typical factors related to physician’s liability in obstetrics and gynecology departments, as compared to those in internal medicine and surgery, regarding a breach of t...
Many procedures currently require the use of bone grafts to replace or recover bone volume that has been resorbed. However, the patient’s opinion and preferences must be taken into account before implementing ...
2022 Citation Impact
2.7 - 2-year Impact Factor
3.5 - 5-year Impact Factor
1.410 - SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper)
0.809 - SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)
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