Question

Ethical analysis is not limited to a personal ethic. Because groups and institutions are organized to ffect actions that lay beyond the capacities of individuals, there must be an ethic of such entities. Then, too, society at large often bound to stretch our moral imagination to encompass a larger picture from what is good for a single person or even an institution has its ethic and we are More Is Better Beth, a forty-four-year-old divorced mother of two teenagers has been diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. For two years she has undergone two courses of chemotherapy with radiation which to have slowed the progress of the cancer. But during her last visit to her oncologist, she is told that the symptoms are recurring and the metastases have appeared in the lungs. The oncologist suggests she undergo autologous stem cell transplantation which involves the follow- ing steps: a. The patient is given several courses of multiple agent chemotherapy to determine whether or not her cancer remains responsive to chemotherapy. If there is evidence of response, the woman is allowed time to recover from the effects of the chemotherapy, particularly the effects on the bone marrow. b. The patient is then given bone marrow-stimulating drugs and a procedure called plasmapheresis is performed to "harvest stem cells" from her blood stream. This involves being connected to a machine which separates the cells being collected, "stem cells," from other compo- ents of blood and returns the plasma and unused white and red cells to the patient. This proce- dure needs to be performed four to six times for approximately four hours each time to collect enough stem cells. These cells are then frozen and stored c. The patient is then given "ablative" (very high) doses of chemotherapy and total body irradia- tion in order to kill any remaining cancer cells. d. The stem cells are infused back into the patient, repopulate the patient's bone marrow and, hopefully, the patient recovers but the cancer cells do not. If the stem cells (and/or bone marrow) fail to take, the patient dies. Toxicity of this treatment is obviously very high. The patient requires protective isolation for several weeks following ablative chemotherapy and total body irradiation. Treatment-related mortality varies, but is likely to be at least 25%. Failure of stem cells (and bone marrow) to take occurs in 5-10% of cases. Recurrence of breast cancer following treatment occurs in 30-50% of survivors. There are a number of other serious side effects of treatment including sterility, cataracts, second cancers and the like e. Cost of the entire series of procedures varies but it is in the range of $75,000. When Beth hears that her insurer will not pay for the procedure and that the medical center will only perform this procedure on women if the patient's third-party payor agrees to cover it, Beth asks the ethics committee to review the hospital's institutional policy 50 Boet hics Form Fall 1995

Answer 1

Answer: Experimental treatments in future becomes more burden than benefits because experimental treatments are usually not proved to be in favour or unfavorable for the patient's conditions. So, if the treatment didn't produced positive results or it may cause any harmful or adverse outcomes, it becomes burden on healthcare professionals.

The ethical principles are different for the experimental as well as established treatment. This is because in the established treatment the healthcare professionals provides the treatment which has been proved and many patients got positive results with the established treatment. So, ethical principles here does the particular treatment. But in the experimental treatments, when there is not just enough proof of the patients got cured with this kind of Methods then there is different ethics involved.