A basic thesis of this website is that ethical problems are common in the emergency department – much more common than is usually recognized. The difficult ethical dilemmas of emergency medicine have not attracted the widespread attention enjoyed by other areas of medicine, however.
Why have a legal introduction in a website on ethical issues in emergency medicine? Certainly not because ethics and law are synonymous, even though attempts to discuss ethical choices are frequently reduced by the pressures of the moment to worries about legal obligations and risks.
The next set of case studies, in which three patients with varying degrees of injury and different prognoses are described, is designed to raise the question of the role of the severity of the patient’s injury in the determination of his competence.
Two paramedics radio to the hospital that they are bringing in a 54-year-old man with chronic lung disease. They state that he is on “10 or 20” medications, but he does not have them all with him, and he does not know what they are.