Important: This page is general information, not medical advice. It does not recommend or prescribe any treatment. Always consult your doctor or pharmacist before starting, stopping or changing any medicine.
About Medical Ethics
The field of ethics studies principles of right and wrong. There is hardly an area in medicine that doesn't have an ethical aspect. For example, there are ethical issues relating to :
- End of life care: Should a patient receive nutrition? What about advance directives and resuscitation orders?
- Abortion: When does life begin? Is it ethical to terminate a pregnancy with a birth defect?
- Genetic and prenatal testing: What happens if you are a carrier of a defect? What if testing shows that your unborn baby has a defect?
- Birth control: Should it be available to minors?
- Is it ethical to harvest embryonic stem cells to treat diseases?
- Organ donation: Must a relative donate an organ to a sick relative?
- Your personal health information: who has access to your records?
- Patient rights: Do you have the right to refuse treatment?
- When you talk with your doctor, is it ethical for her to withhold information from you or your family?
It sits within Social/Family Issues, Health System and Personal Health Issues.
When to speak to someone. Reading about a topic cannot tell you whether it applies to you. Speak to a doctor or pharmacist if symptoms are severe, sudden, getting worse, or simply not going away — and seek emergency care immediately for chest pain, breathing difficulty, sudden weakness or confusion, or a serious allergic reaction.
Research on Medical Ethics
21 studies areregistered for this condition on ClinicalTrials.gov, the U.S. National Library of Medicine's public registry. A selection is below — the links go straight to the registry entry, not to a summary of ours.
What a registered study does and does not mean. Registration means a study exists and has been declared publicly. It says nothing about whether the treatment being tested works, is safe, or is available to you. Many studies find no benefit — that is what research is for. Never seek out an experimental treatment on the strength of a registry entry alone.
Research currently under way
- Lifestyle Advice in CVDUniversity of Nottingham
- Dental Communication and Social Media: Legal and Ethical FrameworkUniversity of Roma La Sapienza
- Clinical Learning Through Extended Immersion in Medical Simulation (CLEIMS)-A New Approach to Teaching Clinical EthicsKaohsiung Medical University Chung-Ho Memorial Hospital
- Treatment for Aerobic Vaginitis by Using Bofukang Vaginal SuppositoryPeking University Shenzhen Hospital
Research already completed
- Anesthesia Counseling, Consent, & ProfessionalismJohns Hopkins University
- Role Model-Based Ethics Education and Moral Injury Prevention in Second-Year Medical StudentsChun Lun Hsu
- Don't Throw Your Heart Away: Medical Student Study 2Carnegie Mellon University
- Don't Throw Your Heart Away: Clinician Study 3Carnegie Mellon University
- What we Think About the Do-not-resuscitate Order: Survey StudySultan Abdulhamid Han Training and Research Hospital, Istanbul, Turkey
- Construction and Preliminary Application of Mindfulness-based Emotional Regulation Intervention Scheme for Adolescents With Anxiety Disorder and CaregiversZhan Yuxin
Study data from ClinicalTrials.gov, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Retrieved 2026-07-30. Registry entries are supplied by study sponsors and investigators; ClinicalTrials.gov does not verify their scientific validity. PocketsInfo is not affiliated with, and not endorsed by, the NLM or the NIH.
Where to read more
Rather than paraphrase, we point you to the primary sources. Every link below is to a government health agency, a national institute or a recognised medical body — grouped by what you are trying to find out.
Learn More
- AI in HealthcareHastings Center for Bioethics
- End of Life CareAGS Health in Aging Foundation
- Genetic DiscriminationNational Human Genome Research Institute
- Organ TransplantationHastings Center for Bioethics
- Psychiatric Advance DirectivesAmerican Psychiatric Association
- Research Ethics TimelineNational Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
- What Is Ethics in Research and Why Is It Important?National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
Medical subject headings
Clinicians and researchers index this subject under Ethics, Medical. These are the terms to use when searching medical literature.
This page is built from the MedlinePlus health topic record for Medical Ethics, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health. Information is from MedlinePlus.gov. PocketsInfo is not affiliated with, and is not endorsed by, the NLM or the NIH. Retrieved 30 July 2026.