medical ethics vs negligence - discuss?

brndonnie

A doctor is approached by a patient who ONLY states they have been having great trouble concentrating and focusing while studying in the run-up to their fe1 exams. The doctor is concerned that the stress the patient is under is contributing and compounding to their lack of application and focus. He therefore prescribes medication, that although created to help patients suffering from ADD, will help the patient concentrate and ultimately do better on the exam.

The doctor knows that by prescribing this patient with said medication he maybe giving an unfair advantage to this test taker as opposed to other test takers who are in a similar bind. He also knows that other doctors have been prescribing a growing trend of patients in the exact same situation with the same medication and those patients have outperformed their peers. Has the doctor acted unethically or even negligently by knowingly prescribing performance altering medication?

discuss?

PCPhoto

whats to discuss - the doctor should only be concerned with the patient.....if their patient is having problems with lack of concentration/focus...it is irrelevant if the patient has exams.

the patient does not have an advantage over his/her peers .... some of his/her peers may not have been suffering from lack of focus/concentration....some will...so its only an advantage (if even) on those who are also unable to concentrate.

if other members of the class goto the doc and are suffering the same lack of concentration/focus ...thus prescribed the same medication.

Reloc8

Doctor is treating patient. It would be unethical not to consider drug options which could alleviate symptoms and advise accordingly. Doctor can not consider effect on persons not taking the same drugs ahead of his patients interests.

Ironically doctor also increases chances of being sued in the future.

You are operating from a false assumption that the drug will increase concentration levels beyond those normally within the capacity of the patient were they perfectly healthy.

You do state, however, that the doctor is aware that a growing trend of doctors prescribing similar drugs in similar situations has lead to an those students out-performing their peers. There is a poor nexus of cause and effect here. The students may be faking the symptoms, the students affected may be high achievers who are burned out from high levels of study, thus causing the symptoms, and would have out-performed their peers regardless. Even on a basic medical level a small number of students who have benefited in this way is far too small a sample size to properly correlate a cause and effect. For that you would need to know the total number of people who had taken the drug AND then taken exams AND how they performed AND how that deviated from the mean. Beyond all that there is no evidence that the doctor is basing this belief on anything other than word of mouth.

In short, there is no ethical dilemma as the Doctor has to treat the patient before him or her and there is in no way a sufficient level of scientific evidence to show that there even might be an ethical issue.