Ethical Transparency and Economic Medicalization

Abstract

shareholder wealth maximization, medicalization, bioethics, medical ethics,

Why is an ethical and integrated audit accreditation process required for Romanian hospitals

“…Several issues have been analysed since the late 1990s: civic responsibility of the healthcare organisation ; the evaluation of the ethical program (Neft-Smith, Scott, Edward & Fletcher, 1997); good practices in the ethics of hospital units (Cassidy, 1998); ethical leadership (Johnston, Cruess & Cruess, 2001;Dolan, 2004;) and the challenges raised by ethics and the responsibilities of leaders in the healthcare system (Squazzo, 2012); ethical dimensions in public healthcare policies (Roberts & Reich, 2002); ethics and the safety of hospitals (Weinstein, 2002) and ethics and patient safety (Lachman, 2008); challenges of ethical committees (Collier & Sandborg, 2006;Hogstel & Curry, 2004); the ethics of decision-making (Maddalena, 2007;Slosar, 2004); ethical transparency and economic medicalisation (Poitras & Meredith, 2009); the organisational costs of ethical conflicts (Nelson, Weeks & Campfield, 2008;Hofmann, 2012); and the ethics of decisions concerning the allocation of resources (Hofmann, 2011). The aforementioned issues have the commonality that if they are not considered properly, they can weaken quality of care and organisational performance.…”

OxyContin, prescription opioid abuse and economic medicalization

“…Driven by the remarkable evolution of the medical profession in the last two decades, it is becoming gradually apparent that the medicalization concept is too diverse to be analyzed with a unifying methodology. 4,5,7,22 In particular, considerable insight is gained if medicalization is dichotomized into two categories: social medicalization, dealing with the type of social control issues that originate with Parsons, Szasz, and Wootton; and economic medicalization, dealing with the markets for medical technology and professional services driven by the corporate profit motive.…”

“…As Poitras and Meredith observe: "There is an ethical transparency problem." 4 The difficulty of discerning the ethical motivations of specific players within the medical profession can even occur for physicians, for whom the ethics of professional fiduciary responsibility would seem to be clear-cut, based on standards of medical ethics stretching back to the oath of Hippocrates, which first appeared around the fifth century BC. 27 The oath protects the rights of the patient by appealing to the strong character of the physician; no formal sanctions or penalties are contemplated.…”

“…Recognizing the remarkable technological and economic evolution of the medical profession in the last two decades, various studies find that medicalization is too diverse a concept to be analyzed with a unifying methodology. [4][5][6][7] As a consequence, it is useful to dichotomize the concept of medicalization into two distinct components: economic medicalization, where the commercial profit motive plays a central role; and social medicalization, where traditional concerns of social control predominate. Poitras 8,9 and Poitras and Meredith 4 demonstrate that economic medicalization involves a sharp ethical divergence between the goal of SWM, associated with business ethics, and the norms of science and the scientific method, associated with medical ethics.…”

“…4 Given this, accurate analysis of economic medicalization requires the relevant nonmedical and medical problems involved to be defined. Traditional definitions focus on the therapeutic use of prescription drugs.…”