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The International Guidelines For Biomedical Research Involving Human Subject

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Every individual has the right to privacy. According to Webster’s, privacy is defined in terms of a person having control over the extent, timing, and circumstances of sharing their information whether it be physically, behaviorally, or intellectually, with others. The International Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subject was created in 1993 by the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) and the World Health Organization (WHO). These guidelines not only provide clear requirements for respecting the privacy of research participants and maintaining the confidentiality of their personal information., but also for all health care professionals to adhere too. Confidentiality is one of the …show more content…

The main ethical argument around confidentiality is whether more harm is done by sometimes breaching confidentiality or by always respecting it regardless of the consequences. The ethical dilemma that will be analyzed is, if is it acceptable for healthcare providers to break this patient confidentiality if he or she knows that a patient’s health status may be harming others. According to research done by Kleinman et al, the confidentiality of a patient’s information is prescribed in law. This means that there are legal requirements in order to reveal certain kinds of information without the patient’s consent which are defined in both statutory and common law. This ethical dilemma can be analyzed with three major moral principles. These principles were created to give people a shared and serviceable group of norms for analyzing many types of moral problems (Beauchamp, 2007). The first moral principle to be applied to this dilemma is Autonomy. Autonomy is the principle that gives individuals the right to be self-determining and to act autonomously, deciding for oneself what to do (Munson, 2013). It is rooted in the liberal moral and political tradition of the importance of individual freedom and choice (Beauchamp, 2007). It is the physician’s duty to respect the patient’s autonomy in all medical decision-making. This means that the patient has the right to control

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