Practicing Medicine and Ethics: Integrating Wisdom, Conscience, and Goals of Care

by Lauris Christopher Kaldjian

Overview

To practice medicine and ethics, physicians need wisdom and integrity to integrate scientific knowledge, patient preferences, their own moral commitments, and society's expectations. This work of integration requires a physician to pursue certain goals of care, determine moral priorities, and understand that conscience or integrity require harmony among a person's beliefs, values, reasoning, actions, and identity. But the moral and religious pluralism of contemporary society makes this integration challenging and uncertain. How physicians treat patients will depend on the particular beliefs and values they and other health professionals bring to each instance of shared decision making. This book offers a framework for practical wisdom in medicine that addresses the need for integrity in the life of each health professional. In doing so, it acknowledges the challenge of moral pluralism and the need for moral dialogue and humility as professionals fulfill their obligations to patients, themselves, and society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107012165
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	05/26/2014
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.83(d)

About the Author

Lauris Christopher Kaldjian is Director of the Program in Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, where he holds the Richard M. Caplan Chair in Biomedical Ethics and Medical Humanities and is also a professor in the Department of Internal Medicine. His research interests have been directed toward end of life concerns, goals of care, disclosure of medical errors, ethics education, and the role of philosophical and religious beliefs in clinical decision making. He has received research grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation, and his publications can be found in a variety of medical and bioethics journals. At the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, he practices outpatient General Internal Medicine, chairs the Ethics Committee, and serves as Medical Director for Clinical Ethics. In the College of Medicine, he teaches ethics to medical students and co-directs the Humanities Distinction Track. He has served on the Ethics Committee of the United Network for Organ Sharing, chaired the Ethics Committee of the Society of General Internal Medicine, and served as a Deputy Editor for the Journal of General Internal Medicine. He currently chairs the Committee on Law and Ethics of the Iowa Medical Society. He is a member of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities and a Fellow in the American College of Physicians.

Table of Contents

1. Medicine as a goal-directed, moral practice; 2. Virtue ethics; 3. Practical wisdom in medicine; 4. Conscience and its relation to practical wisdom; 5. The authority, fallibility, and normative reach of conscience; 6. Conscience as integrity; 7. The challenge and inescapability of religious pluralism; 8. Implications of moral pluralism for public dialogue and professional practice; 9. Conscientious objection and conscientious practice; 10. An integrity-centered framework for practical wisdom in medicine.

Editorial Reviews

"Both our shared political discourse and the day-to-day encounters between physicians and their patients are characterized by complex questions about the place of conscience in medicine. Lauris Kaldjian, trained as both physician and ethicist, offers a way to think through these difficulties by focusing on medicine as a practice shaped by its goals and marked by important virtues. Both patients and physicians can find here help for thinking in moral terms about the encounters they share."
Gilbert Meilaender, Valparaiso University

"Lauris Kaldjian offers a rich exploration of the roles that conscience, integrity, and moral reasoning can play in promoting health care that is both medically and ethically sound. As physicians face ever-increasing challenges and pressures, Kaldjian provides an astute synthesis of the "practical wisdom" that doctors need to navigate those challenges and pressures."
David Orentlicher, Indiana University Schools of Law and Medicine

From the Publisher