Medical Ethics Quotes

Embryonic stem cell research is at the leading edge of a series of moral hazards.

As an O.B. doctor of thirty years, and having delivered 4,000 babies, I can assure you life begins at conception.

Measures of sterilization should, in my opinion, be very definitely confined to persons who are mentally defective

In 1967 the abortion laws in England were liberalized and we were all assured that this would not lead to abortion on demand or a decline in respect for unborn life or pressure on medical staff to become involved in abortion against their conscience. Five million abortions later those claims look hollow.

You meet Rush at a certain point in his life where he's made a decision that he's going to not live by the moral code of being a doctor. He's decided to disengage with that side of his life for various reasons, which we find out through the first season.

When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.

Social reform is the desperate decision to remove corns from a person suffering from cancer.

I think the personal satisfaction of doing good in the community and increasing value and holding true to the Hippocratic oath and being able to provide services to those that are in need is very strong moral reason to provide services for the underserved.

Drug company payments to doctors are a small part of a much larger strategy by Big Pharma to clean our pockets.

We slow the progress of science today for all sorts of ethical reasons. Biomedicine could advance much faster if we abolished our rules on human experimentation in clinical trials, as Nazi researchers did.

Unfortunately, in rich-world health, innovation is both your friend and your enemy. Innovation is inventing organ replacement, joint replacement. We're inventing ways of doing new things that cost $300,000 and take people in their 70s and, on average, give them an extra, say, two or three years of life. And then you have to say, given finite resources, should we fire two or three teachers to do this operation?

The public relies on the advice of doctors and leading researchers. The public has a right to know about financial relationships between those doctors and the drug companies who make the pharmaceuticals prescribed by doctors.

I think we're rapidly approaching the day where medical science can keep people alive in hospitals, hooked up to tubes and things, far beyond when any kind of quality of life is left at all.

When I came to this country in 1958, to be a dying patient in a medical hospital was a nightmare. You were put in the last room, furthest away from the nurses' station. You were full of pain, but they wouldn't give you morphine. Nobody told you that you were full of cancer and that it was understandable that you had pain and needed medication.

That term was used with hyperbole about the parts of the health care bill where doctors are mandated, if people are on Medicare and of a certain age or in serious physical condition, to counsel them on their end-of-life alternatives. I don't believe that was a death panel.

It is possible in medicine, even when you intend to do good, to do harm instead. That is why science thrives on actively encouraging criticism rather than stifling it.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him.

It seems an easy choice - sacrifice the tree for a human life - until one learns that three trees must be destroyed for each patient treated. Suddenly we must confront some tough questions. How important are the medical needs of future generations?

The Church believes that human organs cannot be viewed as objects of purchase and sale. The transplantation of organs from a living donor can be based only on the voluntary self-sacrifice for the sake of another's life.

Politicians, please, think of yourselves! Move to help Terri Schiavo, and no one will be mad at you, and you'll keep a human being alive.

Organ donation is very personal to me. My mother, before her death, was on kidney dialysis for several years.

It would have been more to the point, more honest and more Christian, in past decades not to support those who intentionally destroyed healthy life than to rebel against those who have no other wish than to avoid disease. Moreover, a policy of laissez faire in this sphere is not only cruelty to the individual guiltless victims but also to the nation as a whole... If the Churches were to declare themselves ready to take over the treatment and care of those suffering from hereditary diseases, we should be quite ready to refrain from sterilizing them.

I think abortion is something that, as a personal matter, I would advise somebody against.

To those who have chosen the profession of medicine, a knowledge of chemistry, and of some branches of natural history, and, indeed, of several other departments of science, affords useful assistance.