Cuadernos de Bioética : Revista Oficial de la Asociación Española de Bioética y Ética Médica

Spirituality is the human dimension that helps human beings to reflect about their own existence, to try to answer to questions like: what are we living for? This search of meaning is still more pronounced in those who suffer an advanced and incurable disease. This clear need is nevertheless not always acknowledge by the patient, making it difficult to detect and manage it in the daily care by healthcare professionals. In an effort to establish an effective therapeutic relationship, they have to keep in mind also this spiritual dimension, already integrated in the concept of comprehensive care and usually offered to all patients, especially in those who are at the end of life...

The aim of this article is to explore John Henry Newman's reflections on the meaning of the medical profession in a lecture to medical students in Dublin. Specifically, it will show how Newman's exposition of what we have called the ″medical fallacy″ allows us to consider him as an authoritative interlocutor in the debate on the naturalistic fallacy and the indefinition of the good, led by David Hume and Georg Edward Moore. Thus, in times of COVID-19, euthanasia and emotivism, delving into the thought of the English author can contribute to illuminating the bioethical problems of our time...

Renal dysfunction is common and can be severe in patients requiring cardiac surgery. There is currently a growing international interest in the declaration of Safe Health Units, around the safety of the surgical patient. This interest is influenced at the same time by utilitarianism and the defense of the great value of human life. The general objective was to analyze, from the bioethics of health care and the contents of surgical patient safety, acute kidney injury associated with cardiac surgery. A systematic review was carried out using the PRISMA methodology in PubMed databases with articles published in the last five years...

This article aims to explore the bioethical problems that are concentrated around the Umbilical Cord Blood. The publication in the year 2020 in Spain of the new National Umbilical Cord Blood Plan recalls the current status of the issue. The bioethical problems of umbilical cord blood have not been specially studied, rather there are few studies in this regard and above all they have focused on the controversy over its autologous use and its storage in private banks. This work, the result of reading twenty-six institutional statements from the most diverse institutions in different countries, offers a detailed and systematic enumeration of the bioethical problems that arise around the life of umbilical cord blood and proposes, fundamentally, a classification with an evolutionary criterion, that is, following the course of the Umbilical Cord Blood, from its donation to its use, passing through the problems of donors and storage...

Nowadays, medicine tends towards specialization. But there are also more shared or interdisciplinary processes in which professionals request some type of technique or a diagnostic or therapeutic procedure that must performed by another specialist. In this scenario that involves different professionals, it is reasonable a certain debate about which of them should obtain the informed consent of the patient. The first error would be to pose this process as a confrontation between professionals who derive or delegate their own responsibilities to another...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Since the beginning of the commercialization, in 1960, of combined estrogen-progestin hormonal contraceptives (CHCs), their use has become widespread for other non-contraceptive indications: dysmenorrhea, irregular cycle length, hypermenorrhea and acne, among others (Lete, 2009; Barranco, 2016). In all cases, these are mild pathologies or minor symptoms for which there are effective therapeutic alternatives. Millions of women in the world receive this treatment, which acts by inhibiting the hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian hormonal axis (HHO Axis), the central axis and regulator of the entire sexual and reproductive physiology of women...

In 2008 Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu published an article arguing for the need to biotechnologically enhance moral capacities in order to address the risks implicit in the development of cognitive enhancements. In their view, the more individuals are intellectually enhanced, the greater the possibility of causing harm. To balance this risk, cognitive enhancement must be accompanied by moral enhancement (genetic, pharmacological or cybernetic) that extends to the entire population. This thesis has been made explicit over time in various works, in dialogue with other experts...

Social and communication skills play an important role in the relationship between healthcare professionals and their patients. In this field, it is plausible that clinical empathy and loneliness play an important role of influence. However, the knowledge about this roll is still scarce. The main purpose of this review was to collect findings reported on this matter in students and healthcare professionals. The review included: articles published in English or Spanish during the last fifty years that were indexed in MedLine or SCOPUS, with students or health professionals as participants, and where empathy and loneliness had been used as main measures...

The concept of natural death has been present in philosophical, medical and social reflection for centuries, fulfilling a double function: understanding human finitude and hoping for a desirable way to reach the end of our days. Today, those goals have been blurred by the sense of control over death that comes from the high technology of medicine, the dreams of immortality nurtured by the media, and the confusing line drawn between autonomy and dignity. This article studies the concept of natural death that in the past 20th century was the subject of debate between health workers and bioethicists and that at the beginning of this 21st century has already begun to be questioned...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Conscientious objection in the healthcare professions was a topic that Gonzalo Herranz addressed early on and with a very particular perspective. At all times he moved away from a strictly legal discussion to delve into the real grounds that justify a healthcare agent's refusal to submit to a certain rule, considering that it goes against his or her conscience. This article presents some of the main issues that Professor He- rranz addressed in his publications and conferences in relation to conscientious objection...

Palliative medicine is the medicine that accompanies the person in their process of dying for alleviate their unwanted suffering, is a medicine that offers comfort care to the patient and his family, a medicine that does not prolong life unnecessarily at the expense of suffering, but rather it widens it, it is a medicine that takes care of life. Medical deontology tells us how our good medical practice through the rules contained in the Code of Ethics. In this article I address the practice of palliative medicine taking into account medical deontology, focusing on two issues that generate controversy such as palliative sedation and euthanasia...

Legal duties of information, obtaining consent, confidentiality and protection of patient's privacy must be scrupulously fulfilled. However, Medical Ethics and Deontology impose a higher level of requirement on the doctor-patient relationship, namely, to adapt these duties to the specific patient and the specific situation. This means individualizing the medical act and making it absolutely personal; personalization in the doctor-patient relationship makes it unique and excellent, the moral objective of the medical profession from the Hippocratic precepts to the present day...

This paper explains basic ideas of Gonzalo Herranz on research ethics, in general and on human beings, obtained from the study of the fragmentary material that has been preserved (drafts and class outlines). Among other ideas, I present his thoughts on the ethical foundations of the researcher's actions: the target of the researcher, the active and passive duty to investigate, the freedom of research and the peculiarities of the relationship between the researcher and the subject of research/patient.

Those who knew Prof. Gonzalo Herranz Rodríguez share a common feeling in which respect and admiration are intermingled, transmitted from a natural and simple personality. He generated a remarkable capacity for attraction. In the broad field of bioethics he has left an indelible example of passionate and tenacious defence of scientific truth, both in the multiple facets that mark the daily life of medical action with respect to the sick, and in his clear international leadership when it was necessary to point out where authenticity was to be found in the biological findings on the first stages of the human embryo that later enable correct medical action to be guaranteed...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

It seems beyond doubt that the practice of certain sports requires gender differentiation, given the sexlinked characteristics that determine different levels of performance and skills. Moreover, there is a consensus on condemning doping practices, such as attempts to artificially alter the physical performance of athletes through the use of certain substances, because they involve tampering with the physical or mental conditions of the persons involved, as well as practices that have health risks, with consequences that can become serious and irreversible...

Until 2020, only Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and the Netherlands admitted, under differentiated legal coverage, requests for euthanasia and / or assisted suicide in patients with non-terminal illnesses, and for reasons of intractable and unbearable suffering. Since March 2021 this is also possible in Spain. The objective of this work is to review the existing studies and characteristics of the practice of euthanasia and assisted suicide (ESA) in people with mental disorders (TM) and / or dementia (D) and see if the legal requirements essential in ESA applications in these patients are to be met...