Medical ethics

Medical ethics is the set of principles and standards that guides moral decisions and professional conduct in medicine and health care.

Autonomy: The capacity and right to make informed choices about one's own life and body. It grounds patients’ authority to accept or refuse medical care.
Shared decision-making: A clinical process in which patients and professionals jointly choose among care options. It combines clinical evidence with patients’ goals and preferences.
Hippocratic Oath: An ancient Greek text expressing professional duties for physicians, including confidentiality and limits on harmful acts. It is an early statement of duties associated with medical practice.
Medical paternalism: A practice in which clinicians make decisions for patients, claiming to act in their best interests. It conflicts with approaches that give priority to patient autonomy.
Artificial intelligence in healthcare: The use of computational systems to support or automate health-care tasks. Its errors, opacity, and data demands complicate accountability and fairness.
Beneficence: The ethical duty to promote another person's welfare. Clinicians weigh potential benefits when choosing care for patients.
Advance directive: A legal document specifying a person's treatment preferences or decision-maker if they cannot speak for themselves. It carries treatment choices forward when a patient loses decision-making capacity.
Nuremberg Code: A 1947 code setting voluntary consent and other standards for human experimentation. It emerged after Nazi medical crimes exposed the need for research safeguards.
Utilitarianism: A moral theory that evaluates actions by their consequences for overall well-being. Its focus on aggregate outcomes can conflict with individual rights and duties.
Genetic privacy: The protection and control of information derived from a person's genetic data. Genetic findings can affect relatives as well as the person tested.

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