Medical ethics and Bio-ethics

Medical ethics and Bio-ethics
By: Morteza Agha Mohammadi

Bio-ethics is a bunch of admirable rituals and customs that physicians should practice and specific codes to avoid. So the nature of bio-ethics is to be moral and to enjoin goodness and prohibit evil in the medical field.
The important point in bio-ethics is the philosophy of ethics. The way that a specific school depicts and defines human and issues related to him are very determining here.
Bioethics is not just a series of principles but implies, in the European tradition at least, a moral obligation to act. (Medical ethics and bioethics in Europe, 2009)
According to one usage, the terms ‘medical ethics’ and ‘bioethics’, are synonymous. Sometimes the term ‘biomedical ethics’ is used in roughly the same sense. According to another usage, they are not synonymous.
Medical ethics is defined roughly as follows:
Interdisciplinary teaching and research discipline which critically, historically and analytically identifies and examines moral and ethical aspects of health care and medical research. ( Hermerén, 2002, p. 26)
It follows from this definition that clinical ethics, dealing with the day-to-day moral decision-making of those caring for patients, typically focusing on individual cases, and seeking to determine what should be done here and now with a particular patient, is part of medical ethics but not identical with it.
‘Bioethics’ can be defined more or less narrowly:
The study of the ethical problems raised by production, uses, and biotechnological modification of micro-organisms, plants and animals in agriculture, pharmaceutical industry or food production. ( Hermerén, 2002, p. 27)
Technological breakthroughs have not been the only factor in the increasing interest in ethical problems in this area. Another factor has been a growing concern about the power exercised by doctors and scientists, which shows itself in issues about “patients’ rights” and the rights of the community as a whole to be involved in decisions that affect them. It was in the climate of such new ethical issues and choices that the field of inquiry now known as “bioethics” was born. The word was not originally used in this sense. … “bioethics” came to refer to the growing interest in the ethical issues arising from health care and the biomedical sciences.

bioethics can also be seen as a modern version of a much older field of thought, namely medical ethics. Undoubtedly, bioethics claims medical ethics as part of its province, but in many ways it takes a distinctly different approach. Traditionally, medical ethics has focused primarily on the doctor–patient relationship and on the virtues possessed by the good doctor.  Bioethics, on the other hand, is a more overtly critical and reflective enterprise. Not limited to questioning the ethical dimensions of doctor–patient and doctor–doctor relationships, it goes well beyond the scope of traditional medical ethics in several ways. First, its goal is not the development of, or adherence to, a code or set of precepts, but a better understanding of the issues. Second, it is prepared to ask deep philosophical questions about the nature of ethics, the value of life, what it is to be a person, the significance of being human.
Third, it embraces issues of public policy and the direction and control of science. In all these senses, bioethics is a novel and distinct field of inquiry. Nevertheless, its history must begin with the history of medical ethics. ( Kuhse & Singer, 2009, pp. 4-11)
Nuclear transfer is a crude disruption of a delicate and barely understood biological process. Most cloned animals die during gestation and, because of abnormal placentas or abnormally large fetuses, can kill the surrogate mother…However , even if cloning humans could be done as safely as IVF , opinions on whether it should be allowed are divided. Would we deny an infertile couple a chance to have a cloned child? ( Scott & Weissman, 2004, p. 27) This is what bio-ethics endeavors to respond.